heaven's paella

thanks to the demolition of the ACS building, our saturday lunch is now filled with uncertainty. the building used to house the old reliable jollibee wherein saturday after saturday i order the 2-piece chickenjoy and get bottomless refills of gravy. i never get tired of that crispy chicken skin, and now thanks to this blog i'm craving for it. now that its gone, we started to explore different restaurants around our building. last saturday, we had barbeque paella at heaven's barbeque.

out of the running

my first jab at running was a practice run at up diliman. it was just before the recent craze for running events peaked and i wasn't into it enough to finish an entire lap. then like zits on my face 15 years ago, running events sprouted everywhere. even my small college had one and that was my first ever official run.

my run wont be a finalist in the best first run ever award if there was one. i basically jogged a fourth of that 3k run then walked the rest. then right after the run me and my friends went straight to rodic's for their famous tapsilog. we were starving after that run walk. after feeling guilty of eating my run away with that sweet tapsilog, i vowed to live the healthy life and try to join more runs (and actually run) in the future.

a great burger in an unlikely house

it was an ordinary sunday with my family and we decided to have lunch at pancake house. browsing through the menu, all i wanted was a typical rice meal or a sandwich. i never really thought about burgers in a restaurant with pancakes in their name. i ordered a potato salad and a clubhouse sandwich. my mother ordered the jumbo house burger and soon as i heard it, i instantly changed my mind and ordered the same. she had me at jumbo. my mother, being a mother, gave way and changed her order to a sandwich.

politicality

i haven't seen good philippine tv in a while and now i'm religiously following this GMA drama. no, not the network, of course i meant the ex-president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. i just watched the Arroyos go into NAIA, put on a show and then get burned by immigration.

as soon as i caught the tweet announcing the TRO on the watchlist order of the DOJ, i got hooked. for days i've seen and heard different sides on the watchlist order whether its unconstitunional or not. the problem with the law is that it has loopholes, and to be perfectly honest, i believe both sides are right. it's just a matter of interpretation of the law. that being said, what are we arguing about here? the right to travel? do you honestly think that a normal filipino would experience the same? ramona bautista got away easy. though in all news network headlines, she is not of national interest. but cGMA is.

figaro bakes

it was the day before my girlfriend went home to palawan. we were supposed to meet at gateway at around 3pm. i got there on time but the heavy traffic at aurora swallowed up her time. our time. i originally planned on waiting at starbucks to at least add another sticker for that overrated planner but all tables were already taken. i then decided to look for another coffee house and settled finally at figaro.

KBOP: not a big Deal

maybe it was from watching too many korean drama series that my mother suddenly craved for korean food. when asked where we should eat, she would always say "anything korean." i then saw an deal on metrodeal.com for "Unique Flavors of Korea with KBOP's Delicious 4 Course Set Meals" at 50% Off. i purchased a voucher right away and happily told my mother. after waiting more than 2 weeks for the voucher to be valid, we finally had the chance to taste KBOP's flavors of korea.

it was a quiet Eidul Adha in Mckinley Hills. we arrived only a few minutes before noon but there were only a handful of people at The Venice Piazza. we came in at KBOP as their first customers which had my mother doubt the popularity, and hence the taste, of the restaurant. we ordered the set meal number 3 and added a couple more dishes. set 3 includes Kbop chicken, tuboo chorim (braised tofu), seafood pancake, korean Gyoza, 5 cups of rice, and a pitcher of iced tea. to add, we ordered  the kbop lechon and tomi chim plus a couple of servings of kimchi.

Slice N Dice: bare t-boned

it was a year back when i started noticing slice n' dice outlets. they were offering steaks for as low as 99 pesos. their locations were a bit inconvenient, reason why it was only when they opened a store in the nearby sm valenzuela that i got to try their steak.

when i see the word "steak," it's almost impossible for the typical filipino to incorporate the word "sizzling." i grew up with sizzling plates in food courts and even in our highschool canteen. back in the day we also tried the steak town restaurant along west ave. when i saw the slice and dice outlets, that's what i imagined the menu would be like, different kind steaks but with a better-than-foodcourt type of atmosphere. sadly, you could memorize the menu due to the lack of choices, it was almost all t-bone!

gaining grounds

it was from one of our medical representatives that i first heard of the idea of coffee grounds for your garden. we were in the middle of a sales meeting when she just had to stop it just to tell me her latest discovery. i believe she saw it on tv as celebrities use starbucks coffee grounds as body scrubs but knowing i'm into gardening, she shared this "grounds for your garden" project by starbucks. the project was introduced in 1995, offering free bags of used coffee grounds to enrich garden soil.

The New Samsung Galaxy (wh)Y

i got a flyer of the samsung galaxy y a week back and was impressed with the features particularly if you know how cheap the phone is. you get the basics, touchscreen (multi-touch), wi-fi, bluetooth, 3g, camera, and the android platform, which i believe is the selling point of this phone. the android os makes this a versatile phone with thousands of apps to choose from the android market. the samsung galaxy y runs on android 2.3.5 gingerbread.

buy and sell

it was on the dying days of friendster when i first saw an ad of ayosdito.ph, a buy and sell site in the philippines. it has been second nature to me to ignore such ads, particularly those that pop up and covers my entire screen. aside from the fact that these ads are annoying, they also have a bad reputation of being sources of viruses and trojan horses. recently, ayosdito.ph was posted as a sponsored ad on facebook, offering ipads and iphones upon registration. officemates noticed and asked me if the ad is true, if they could really win if they join. of course they could. but i wouldn't bet on it. to me, ads like these are better ignored, offering something you don't need. or so i thought.

saturday at the market

for years now, salcedo village has been host to the more than 100 vendors selling at the salcedo community market every saturday. i've been working in salcedo village for quite some time now but the weekly routine of saturday sales meetings made me always forget to visit the place which is only a five-minute walk from our office. i've read about the weekend market countless times on the internet and even saw some feature clips on tv. this time i made an alarm to remind myself to have lunch at the salcedo community market.