But it’s greatest use, so far, is to plan for unplanned dinners. Just this week, the Bachelor Food Bloggers had done so twice. Read on.

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This week had been busy in terms of dining, no thanks to MLQ3’s plurks. It began exactly a week after Juned, MLQ3, and I ate at King Crab. Via Plurk, the Bachelor Food Bloggers Fritz teh Rockstar, Grand Meister Juned, Emperor MLQ3, and page boy me went to Mickey’s Delicatessen last Wednesday; Juned suggested that we try the place. It is located along Jupiter Street in Makati.

Mickey’s is a German restaurant. It has old European house feel to it, with wooden chairs and benches, wooden tables, and waiters in traditional German clothes. The German owner is usually there; he asked us if the food was good. We’ll see.

Juned ordered crispy pork knuckles, aka crispy pata, the Emperor’s favorite. It was very lean, and very tasty, the skin was crispy enough. The gravy was love - there was a hint of wine with it. I prefer eating fried food less dippings and condiments, but you have to try the gravy. The Rockstar kept on warning the Meister about his blood pressure.

The Emperor ordered German potato salad. Contrary to the usual potato salad that we know, this one is mashed, and tastes sour. I did not like it much.

And the piece de resistance - Mickey’s Super Sandwich. It is about 2 feet long, stuffed with cold cuts, cheese, onions, tomatoes, pickles, some green vegetables, and mayonnaise. It is good for 4-6 persons. Personally, I find the bread too tough for me to bite and chew. For the Rockstar, it was surprisingly light for a sandwich, though he had to take out the tomatoes and the pickles. The Meister just kept on chomping, while the Emperor had to take home the half of his sandwich.

We stayed on for some stories (the Meister is a good story teller, he knows a lot). Went home late. Mom spanked me.

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Plurk has its uses, if it works. You can post open invites for whatever. If someone replies, great. If none, too bad. Most of the time, it works. MLQ3 exploits that to the fullest.

So I was again surprised when I got a text message from Juned regarding another dinner plurk from MLQ3. This time, we were joined by Marcelle the Mentalist and Bernard the Habagat. Marcelle suggested this place at Balara called Mang Jimmy’s.

The traffic along C-5 to Katipunan made MLQ3 and Juned hungry (though ABBA and movie/TV themes kept us entertained), then we picked up the other two, and off we were.

Mang Jimmy’s is like a typical carinderia catering to students - it is near UP and Ateneo. It is not surprising that it was full of noisy students when we got there. So we ordered liempo, lengua, blue marlin (me thinks) and tapa - which Marcelle claims to be the house specialty.

Simply put, it was great. It was sweet, tender, and made of awesome. If you find it too sweet, add calamansi to counter the sweetness.

I found the liempo tough to chew, so I let Juned finish it. I like the lengua, but only one plate was ordered, and I was not in the position to complain. The fish was largely ignored. And Bernard was scared by Marcelle’s bended fork routine.

After that, we retired to Bo’s Coffee Club along Katipunan, where Marcelle explained some ideas about mentalism.

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And to add more proof, as of this moment, there is another pending plurk invite for dinner. Let’s see where it goes.

What is Plurk for you?

One of the perils of my current work is that Krispy Kreme is just across the street. It is a temptation that I battle continuously, regularly. But one day, I gave in, no thanks to a friend who I had not seen in quite a while.

The Krispy Kreme at Ayala Ave. is friendly to laptop-toting sugar lovers. And there’s free WiFi also. The seats were comfy, though seating cafeteria-style at the glass window is kinda awkward, unless viewing people is your thing.

Anyway, I had ordered a Cookies and Kreme donut, plus the original Honey Glazed one. For drinks, I ordered their Original Kreme.

When eating at Krispy Kreme, always remember: moderation. You might get greedy, but trust me, on your second one, you would have enough. It’s that sweet. The donut was soft, and so nice to eat. If only it was not that sweet. I didn’t like the drink, it was sweet enough, but it reeked of chemicals. I will definitely avoid it the next time I get there.

Overall, it was an enjoyable experience. Now, if only (1) it is not too sweet and (2) it is not too pricey.

For me, it is the transportation budget that gets the biggest hit - this item is directly affected by the weekly price increases in gasoline and diesel. I am now exploring the most efficient route to take going to and from the office, while at the same time I won’t be late when I go to work and I won’t have to suffer from the stress called MRT twice a day. It is actually a tradeoff issue, but as long as the budget holds, I am OK, I guess.

The first casualty in the list is entertainment. This is not really a big issue, since for this year, I had only seen one movie (The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian), and I am not big into entertaining anyway.

So I have two questions for you:

1. How do you cope with the price increases?
2. What is the cheapest way to entertain nowadays?

The set menu for that day was:

Freshly baked bread with butter. Nothing can go wrong with bread and butter.

Beef Goulash Soup Horseradish Potato Gnocchi. It appeared oily (look at the sides of the dish) and came from a can. The beef cubes were tender, the soup was ok despite its appearance.

Chilled Asparagus, Air-dried Ham, and Spiced Pear Chutney. I am not hot about vegetables, but this dish is good. Asparagus tastes like kamote (that’s just me), the ham was thin (heck, I first thought it was a vegetable, like a pink-colored cabbage), and the pear was sweet (tasted like sweetened white beans). I liked this dish.

Grilled and Poached Breast of Chicken on Lemon and Thyme Fondant Potatoes Spinach and Mushroom Cream Jus. The grilled chicken was heaven, and combined with the mushroom sauce, it was marvelous. It was not dry and quite tasty. If you are not a fan of spinach (it looked ugly), better eat it together with the chicken.

For the vegetarian, there was Pave of Salmon with Braised Baby Gem Lettuce, Five Spice Lentils and Bacon Sauce. Haven’t tried it; obviously you can’t have both.

Dessert is flourless chocolate cake with citrus Anglaise. As I had to go, haven’t tasted this.

If you can afford it, you should consider Renaissance Hotel. And no, this is not a sponsored post.

My theory is that rice is a versatile food. Heck, just add anything to eat and it is already eatable. Let me count the things you can do with it. We’ll concentrate on leftover rice, as most bachelors are prone to have leftovers (if they could cook at all; well, they could buy cooked rice at the corner carinderia).

Of course, there’s the stir-fry rice, which most of us eat in the mornings. It is the best way to deal with leftover rice from last night. My mom cooks rice with the mornings in mind - she makes sure there is enough leftover to stir fry the next morning.

Stir-fry rice is in itself a versatile meal. So versatile in fact that it led to a cottage industry - those tapsilog place of yore. Anyway, in its simplest form (or the base form), you have rice stir fried in oil, with garlic and salt. You will want to have at least a fried egg or hotdog to go with it. Or, you can experiment and add stuff to it; heck, you can make a complete meal of out the base form by just adding food stuff. One simple way of doing this is adding what’s on the ref. My dad usually adds hotdogs, scrambled eggs, and ham. First he fries the chopped hotdogs, then the scrambled egg (which is chopped into cubes later), and the ham (chopped into cubes also). Then he proceeds to the rice: garlic first in the wok, then the rice, some stirring, salt, more stirring, the hotdogs-egg-ham, some more stirring, and voila.

That is actually a variation of the so-called yang chow fried rice. You can make a variation out of it by adding more ingredients to it, like peas, corned beef, onions, longanisa, tapa, leftover fried pork chop, anything. Instead of using cooking oil, you can use butter or margarine. My uncle used to fry rice using Star margarine, obviously inspired by that Star Rice commercial of theirs.

If you have leftover paksiw na pata, here’s a suggestion: bring it to a simmer until it dries. Get the meat and the fat out of the bones, cut them into strips or cubes, then add it to your fried rice. Yummy. You can also do this with leftover adobo.

I used to add liquid seasoning or oyster sauce while frying rice, but this led to the rice sticking to the pan. So what you should do is to add this later, when you have turned off the stove.

Enough of fried rice and let’s proceed to what I call poor man’s rice. There are several variations to this, but there are two that I had already tried. One is adding a little cooking oil and soy sauce to the rice, then mixed thoroughly. That in itself is a variation of rice and salt that poor people eat in very hard times. (It is good to try it to get a sense of how poor people subsist on minimum wage.) There’s my kuya’s favorite: adding condensed milk to rice. Add a generous amount, and then mix. Meal and dessert all in one!

If you have cooked longanisa or tocino, you can do what my other brother does: he mashes rice into the pan where longanisa or tocino was cooked. Sweet and salty and oily, but he likes it.

That’s just for starters. There’s a lot of things you can do with rice. Do you have any quick-and-easy rice recipe? Share them in the comments.

What is the perfect rainy day snack?

Leave your answer at the comments.

How do you deal with garlic breath after eating?

The name of the restaurant is Tempura! (with an exclamation point). MLQ3 ordered a lot of appetizers, and because we were hungry, we attacked them before even taking a picture. Here’s two shots taken when I remembered I should take pictures:

I ordered Gyakiniku Ramen (I hope I remembered the name correctly), ramen with thin beef strips, some veggies, and half a boiled egg.

Nothing special about it. I don’t know if Juned and MLQ3 liked theirs.

The place is OK, though there were small flies (teeny weeny flies), too small to notice immediately.

After that, off to Razon’s. So we ordered halo halo (what else?).

All I can say is: heavenly. Too bad I was too full to enjoy it fully.

After a few hours, the rockstar arrived, and so we went in, and I ordered their Extra Super Batchoy (for Php 85):

Fritz ordered the same, while Juned got Miswa Batchoy with egg, which costs separately. Fritz was disappointed that puto was not available.

The technique in eating batchoy at Ted’s is to ask for another cup of kaldo, or soup. To do that, first finish the soup without eating the noodles and the meat. Then you can ask for another cup of kaldo. That way, you will get distended fully-filled stomach. That’s what the puto is for.

What can I say about Ted’s batchoy? Well, despite eating at Country Style, I almost emptied my bowl, though I did not ask for another kaldo; my two companions did. The contents of the batchoy: the noodles, soup, several strips of pork, several strips of pork liver, chicharon. Heavenly.

The place was no-frills, nondescript. To be honest, it feels like a cafeteria somewhere, but maybe there’s charm on very simple ambiance.

After exchanging gossip while sipping some soup, we retreated to The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at Gateway, for some coffee, vanilla ice blend, and free WiFi. Plus more gossip. =P

Ted’s batchoy is a good but sinful comfort food, specially during cold weather, but again, it is not a day-to-day eat.

The restaurant is located on Level M1 (TriNoma’s floor configuration is very confusing), near Super Bowl of China. It has two entrances, one at the mall, the other at the garden area. The garden side has glass for a wall, and the mall entrance is quite wide open, with traditional Japanese eatery banners. There were padded seats at three sides of the resto, while there are benches and tables at the middle area. Funny thing was, yesterday, they were playing Filipino music; first time I visited, they were playing enka.

Now, to food.

My friend ordered this Gyudon for Php 185.

If you order this one, you would be asked if you want the egg raw, or scrambled together with the beef. My friend chose it raw; the heat of the food cooked it some. The beef were cut into strips. I couldn’t say anything on the taste since it was not the food I ordered. But he did gave me some beef strips. The beef wasn’t tough, but the texture was like bacon. No, it doesn’t taste like bacon.

I ordered Tonkatsu Ramen for Php 225. The last time, I ordered Oki Oki Chicken Teriyaki Ramen. Maybe I should have ordered it yesterday instead of this one.

If you will notice, the presentation appeared to be disturbed. Because it was. I already ate few pieces of pork, put the egg on the side, and stirred the noodles when I remembered to take a picture. (You see, this is what Juned always says about food blogging: sometimes the food appears so inviting you devour it immediately.) The breading of the pork tasted a bit salty. The vegetables were crisp, not overcooked, which is nice. There were two pieces of what I think was the Japanese version of squid balls, except that these don’t have distinctive tastes, as if they were just pastes. The soup had a hint of shrimp stock, which surprised me, but I think it worked well.

I also ordered Mushi Gyoza for Php 125. Basically, it was just five pieces of steamed dumplings.

I’m not sure what’s in them, but they were tasty, with a hint of vegetables in them. There’s a dipping sauce of soy sauce with a bit of vinegar. The vegetable leaf is edible, but we did not eat it.

If you are a light eater, avoid Oki Oki. Their servings are huge. Otherwise, if you really need to eat large and craving for Japanese food, you may want to try Oki Oki. And no, this is not a good day-to-day eat - it will burn a hole in your pocket, and it will make you obese. Is it a good date place? Depends on your date - if she’s a light eater, avoid Oki Oki, or try their hot pot, which might be good for two. Next time I should try that out with friends.

Maybe next time I will do a Oki Oki v. Teriyaki Boy post. Any sponsors? =P