Food Coma Adventures

Hi, world!

Sorry for the absence of posts (especially "Foodie Fridays", which I wanted to do regularly) the past few weeks. But something's been cooking — or, to be more accurate grammatically — baking lately.

And it's this.

My mom just launched her food business in time for the Holidays!

A bit of a background: in the 90's, my mom was involved with various food ventures. She partnered with some friends, and later on, started a cookie business. She had stalls in malls and in school cafeterias. In fact, some of my friends and even the older alumnae of my high school remember her cookies.

However, she gave up the cookie business and pulled out of the malls and cafeterias she was selling in, and went back to working full-time in the academe. This went on for the last 15 or so years.

Now that she has retired, though, she decided to bring back her first love, and this is being in the kitchen.

My mom, Sonia Araneta, was cooking and baking ever since she was practically in diapers (unlike me; I only started a little over two years ago) and has pretty much gotten both disciplines down to a science and an art form. As unbiased as can be, given that I'm her daughter, I'd have to say that she is one of the best cooks/bakers I know of, and she's been one of the biggest motivations for me to get cooking.

This is why I'd like to encourage you all to support her latest endeavor, Noona's Kitchen!

(And by so doing, you are also supporting my semi-reviving interest in photography and feeble attempts at "design" work!)

The name of her business comes from my two-year-old nephew (her grandson), who calls her "Noona" instead of "Nonna" (Italian for "grandmother"). She is currently accepting orders for the Holiday season for both desserts:

Meanwhile, her Signature Apple Pie (PhP 750) is 9" of apple, cinnamon, and French Crumble Topping goodness. This was a recipe developed through the years, and a love for pie making that began when my mom was just 12 years old — long before the notion of MasterChef Juniors ever existed.


Hopefully, things will really take off these next two months. And I'm quite excited to see what will happen beyond December 2016.

For orders or queries, you may send us a message at Noona's Kitchen's Facebook page, or check out our Instagram page.

For those who've already ordered and love our food (truly hoping that you do!), I would really love it if you could leave a review on our Facebook page. Or if you take a photo of your order, kindly tag us at @noonaskitchenph, or use the hashtag #noonaskitchenph.

Stay tuned for future offerings, and thanks for all the love!

Over the last long weekend, my siblings and I decided to make a trip to Alabang (we live all the way in Quezon City, so driving to Alabang with our traffic situation feels like an out-of-town roadtrip many times). It also happened to be the opening of a new LEGO Certified Store in Alabang Town Center that same weekend, so it was the perfect time to drop by.

But before hoarding new LEGO sets, we decided to have lunch at one of our favorite sandwich places, introduced to us by our relatives, the Zorrilla family. Prior to this visit, only my sister and I had been there before (we ate there sometime in May), but it would have been the first time of my brother, Chuck, my sister-in-law, and my nephew.

Located on the ground floor of Commercenter in Alabang, Elbert's Sandwiches is pretty easy to spot. The mall's layout is fairly straightforward and it isn't a big mall either, so you shouldn't have a hard time finding it.

Foodie Friday is a blog prompt that I've created for the purpose of blogging more regularly. It could feature anything from a new ingredient that I've tried, a recipe that I experimented on, or a restaurant I visited.

Earlier this week, my parents celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary, by God's grace. And to end the day with a bang, we made reservations for this restaurant my dad had recently heard about, Xiu Fine Cantonese Dining.

Located along Connecticut Street near the Greenhills shopping complex, the restaurant isn't too difficult to find. Many will remember Lugang Café on this same street, which Xiu replaced.

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.

This blog has been MIA from the blogosphere for the longest time! So, my sincerest apologies to the readers (if any) of this blog for my absence. It's not that I haven't been eating out (I always do) or cooking (I sometimes do); it's just that there wasn't anything blog-worthy — at least food-wise — as of late.

But fret not: I have been scouring the metro (and other cities) for food finds, and I've been working on my culinary skills; particularly, baking. In fact, one of these days, I will try and blog about the different kinds of cheesecakes I've already made and perfected.

Anyway, moving on to today's post!

Recently, my family and I went back to our happy place, which we frequent one to two times a year: Baguio. People usually tell me that they're surprised that we go up as often as we do, and even wonder what's there to do in Baguio. To be perfectly honest, we go there without any particular goal in mind except to relax and to get away from the day to day hassle of Manila living (although Baguio is quickly becoming congested and citified).

Still, there's something charming about returning to our childhood happy place and living simply: enjoying the cool air, being surrounded by lots of trees and flowers, getting to walk around... you get the picture.

However, since more and more people seem to be visiting Baguio as well, the city is rapidly playing catch-up in terms of activities, nightlife, and — you guessed it — restaurants.

One such restaurant we checked out on our last visit two weeks ago was something my mom chanced upon in an online article. When she mentioned they served brick oven pizza, I knew we had to try it out. After all, carbs (pasta and pizza) are my favorite things to eat!

(Apologies in advance for the quality of these photos; unfortunately, I wasn't able to bring my SLR on this trip, and the lighting where I was seated wasn't the most ideal for iPhone food photography.)

A few months ago, my family and I tried to make plans for our dad's 60th birthday celebration. I use the word "tried" because my dad isn't a fan of surprises; he's really one of the most low-key people I've ever met. What we eventually decided on was surprising him with a trip to Baguio, but we had yet to iron out all the details (including making sure that each of us in the family would be available on the weekend that we chose).

Well, surprise, surprise; he was the one who ended up saying, "Can we go to Baguio on *this* weekend?" As if he read our minds.

This meant that we had to come up with another plan within that upcoming Baguio trip instead.

Fast forward to weeks later. Through the suggestion of my sister-in-law's aunt, my mom made a reservation for all 7.25 (the 0.25 being my one-year-old nephew, who didn't need his own place setting; haha!) of us at Mama's Table.

On the day of our reservation, we left Baguio City proper around 10:15am so we could arrive much earlier than our 11am slot. We were surprised to find that we made it in less than 30 minutes.

There was no actual sign outside/near the restaurant, so we had to look for this marker along Ambuklao Road.