The Sassy Lawyer & Pinoy Cook on food, family and home.
At noon on Maundy Thursday, we left Baguio for Vigan in Ilocos Sur. I took photos along the way of whatever looked interesting which weren’t many. Mostly, tobacco and corn fields. Probably the most notable were the eagle statue before exiting La Union and the wide expanse of the South China Sea all the way ... (more)
For the past couple of months, Sam had been talking about Banchetto and how much variety of food there is — from dumplings to pizza to grilled meat and everything in between. She had gone there with her friends and, obviously, she liked the food and the experience. I’ve been wanting to go there since ... (more)
Sorbetes is the local name for artisan ice cream in the Philippines. And although “sorbetes” had become a brand name for an ice cream company, to older generations it will always mean ice cream made on a small scale (to distinguish it from factory made ice cream) and sold in pushcarts like the one you ... (more)
Food hawkers are a common site in the Philippines. In most of Asia, in fact. In the Philippines, turon and banana cue hawkers walk around in the afternoon and call out in their sing-song voices. When the sun sets, it’s the balut vendors’ turn. When we moved to this house over a year and a ... (more)
Probably derived from the Chinese tofu pudding known as dòuhua, taho is a hot sweet snack sold from aluminum vats by ambulant vendors in the Philippines. These vendors are a familiar sight on the streets, vats suspended from the two ends of a wooden yoke, and calling out in a sing-song tone, “Tahooooo… Tahooooo…” Inside ... (more)
In a country where over ninety per cent of the population live below the poverty line, it helps to be both frugal and creative when it comes to food. Nothing illustrates the frugality and creativity of the Filipino better than barbecue. When I was growing up in a not-too-crowded Metro Manila, barbecue meant charcoal-grilled marinated ... (more)
It’s not like I don’t have a chicharon entry in this blog. I do. An old one with with a lousy photo taken with a lousy cam phone. Last Sunday, though, despite plans to watch Die Hard 4 that went awry because the queues were just impossible, I took time out to take photos of ... (more)
Ambulant fishballs vendors are a familiar sight all over the Philippines. From the humblest neighborhood to the posh business districts, their customers range from the barefoot toddlers in slum areas to the yuppies in Makati City. The “kitchen in wheels” include a portable liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) tank and a small gas burner on which ... (more)
It’s a cold day. Raining since morning what with a typhoon lashing the eastern part of Luzon. I hardly got any cooking done with the work still going on in the new kitchen. Meanwhile, the old kitchen has been totally demolished. The old cooking range is somewhere between the living room area and where the ... (more)
Casa is Spanish for house. CASA is also an acronym for Connie, Antonio, Sam and Alex. We are all surnamed Veneracion. We all love to take photos -- of anything that catches our fancy. It's a family obsession.
This is a journal of how we live, eat, learn, play and have fun. Work? Work is part of playing and having fun. Seriously.
In 2003, a time when I hadn't heard of the term "blog", I started a recipe website at cooking.houseonahill.net using a now defunct content management system that ran on ASP. Ok, never mind the geek talk, I'm sure you're not interested in that. The contents easily multiplied and, in 2004, I moved the food site to pinoycook.net. Always unhappy with the fact that the dot com … »»
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