Thursday, March 24, 2016

Recipe: Kani Salad Turned Kani Sandwich



I've been having major cravings for the taste of the kani sandwich I ate at Bankok about two years ago. It's actually just a 7Eleven kani sandwich, but the taste was far cry from the 7Eleven sandwiches being sold here in Manila, the kani sandwich in Bankok is actually really good. Their breads are better there...and the filling is actually spread on enough to taste, unlike here wherein you barely taste what's between those two slices of bread. For probably three consecutive days I ate that fake-crab-and-egg sandwich, sometimes two if I'm in the mood to splurge. For one...it was one of the cheapest items there, and that added up to the happy memory. I usually ate it with chocolate flavored soy milk or a large cup of milk tea being sold by a middle-aged lady in front of the shop. Those were fond mornings indeed...  

So yeah, and since it's a Holy Thursday today, Lenten rituals calls for abstinence from red meat...and this became my solution to that, a perfect excuse to create a recipe based on that memory. But as it eventually turned out, I had forgotten the taste of the sandwich, so I ended up making a nice kani salad instead...but also slathered it on bread and topped it with another bread turning it into a sandwich anyway.

In my unprofessional field of home cooking, I find no need in exact measurements as it is unnecessary to repeat the exact taste over and over, so instead I'll just put in the ingredients I used and leave it according to personal taste. 

Friday, March 18, 2016

Snapshots of Georgetown, Penang




Penang was one of those cities that I've heard once or twice in my life and then I go "meh," but that was until I came, saw, and ate my way through it. In a span of two days and two nights I managed to be giddy at every little turn. As an artist and a lover of food, it felt like being in the right place in a really short time that it took a lot of energy to overcome long hours of endless walks.

At first glace, the ramshackled buildings reminded me of the old quarters in Hanoi, only that it was two floors instead of three. The outskirts resembled a bit of the outskirts of Hong Kong with roadside treelines and high-rise buildings jutting out in between. The food and people reminded me of Singapore with the ethnicity ratio of Chinese-Indian-Malay present in the city, it came to a funny surprise that there was the "la" expression as well. The street-art is one that I dream of BGC to become, murals big and small at almost every corner. Urgh! Take me back to Penang!