Bite Size: Tea Rock Cafe's Beef Noodle Soup

It's very hard for me to resist a big bowl of noodles. So much so that even though I was technically at a milk tea place, I still ordered beef noodles (Seriously, who orders noodles at a tea place?). Anyway, lucky for me, the Beef Noodle Soup at Tea Rock Cafe was surprisingly really good!

Bite Size: Pho Hoa's Flank,Tendon and Meatballs Pho

Gray skies and rain showers seem to be making more appearances these days as we enter the rainy season, and one of my favorite comfort food during rainy days is a big, steaming bowl of noodles. With so many different versions of noodle dishes (ramen, laksa, etc.), my all-time favorite has to be Pho which is Vietnamese Noodle Soup. 

Bite Size: Bread Monster's Cookie S'mores

I'm usually not attracted to cookies, but if you tell me they have marshmallows in them, that's a different story. While we were in the mall, my sister was craving for cookies so we stopped by Bread Monster. We were given a free taste of their best-seller, Cookie S'mores, and one bite was all it took for me to know why Cookie Monster feels the way he does around cookies.

Bite Size: The Chocolate Kiss Cafe's Chicken Kiev

Back in college, when my friends and I wanted to get away for a while from the stress of school work, we would usually find ourselves in The Chocolate Kiss Cafe at the U.P. Bahay ng Alumni, stuffing our face with carbs and cake. Talk about stress-eating! Anyway, my all time comfort food back then was their Chicken Kiev. It was pretty much what I always ordered whenever we were there that I could practically say "the usual," and the waiter would know what I wanted. It's been a year or two since I was last at The Choco Kiss Cafe in U.P. which is why I got so excited when I was finally able to have a taste of this beloved dish again at their Roces branch.

Bite Size: Project Pie's Banana Nutella Pizza

Like with everything else, creativity is what keeps things interesting when it comes to food. As much as we love traditional and classic recipes, we also always crave for something new; something that we never thought would work but will blow our minds.

Take pizza for example. Everyone knows how to make a classic pizza – take some dough, lather it with tomato sauce, sprinkle some cheese, top with meat and vegetables of your choice, and pop it in the oven until it’s nice and toasty. But somehow, someone had this crazy idea of making pizza into a dessert, and let me tell you, it was a brilliant idea.

The pizza I’m talking about is Project Pie’s Banana Nutella Pizza. Project Pie makes really great pizza (you can read my blog post about it here) but their dessert pizza is something you won’t find in other pizza joints. As the name suggests, this dessert pizza is their regular crust topped with bananas, nutella, and is dusted with cinnamon powder. First of all, you can never go wrong with that combination alone. Banana and nutella is an awesome combination, and then you add cinnamon, and it just makes it even more amazing. But then, you take that trio, and you bake it so that the nutella melts and oozes on top of soft and warm bananas. The heat also activates the cinnamon making it even more flavourful and aromatic. All of that on top of a chewy, crusty, toasty crust. It’s just so amazing you’d think pizza was actually originally created as a dessert!

Bite Size: Bigoli's Italian Chicken with Pesto

I love chicken. Fried, steamed, roasted, barbecued – as long as it’s chicken, I’ll eat it. Not all chicken dishes are created alike, though. As much as I love any possible way one can cook chicken, there are some that are just at the top of my favorites list. One of my all time favorite chicken dishes has to be Bigoli’s Italian Chicken. I love it so much that whenever I’m in Trinoma, I literally always eat at Bigoli just because of their chicken.

Aside from the obvious fact that it’s just so darn delicious, one of the reasons why I love it is because I can’t quite put a finger on how it’s cooked. I’m not even sure of what ingredients are used (and I’m someone who can easily dissect a dish’s anatomy and flavors). It will always be a mystery to me how they manage to keep the chicken meat so juicy and tender, but the sauce-drenched skin so crispy. Yes, the skin is sauce-drenched but it’s crispy. The textures are just so perfectly balanced. The meat on its own is flavorful and well-seasoned, but then you have this sauce (I think it’s tomato based) that’s tangy, salty, and a bit spicy all at the same time. That description doesn’t even give the sauce justice but I just don’t know how to describe it. It’s just so damn good!

You have the option of having your chicken with Italian Rice or pasta (red, white or pesto). If you know me, you know pesto has to be my favorite kind of pasta sauce. Bigoli’s pesto is just as good as their chicken that I always have my chicken with their pesto. The pasta is al dente, and it's not too oily. And as if that’s not good enough, aside from their generous serving, all their pasta dishes come with unlimited bread sticks which should come as no surprise, are actually also delicious. I assure you, there’s a reason why this has become one of my all time favorite dishes. 

Bite Size: North Park Special Toasted Noodles

Happy Chinese New Year! Since it is somehow a new year, I want to start something new on my blog. I usually do restaurant reviews here, but sometimes I just really want to talk about a certain food, and not necessarily the whole restaurant. So, I’m starting this series called Bite Size. It’s basically a series of short, “easy to digest” posts about food that I want to do a review on, and recommend.

In the spirit of Chinese New Year, I'm kicking off this series with one of my favorite noodles -- the North Park Special Toasted Noodles. It looks like a bird's nest of crispy noodles cradling a generous amount of vegetables, mushrooms, pork, and fish with a thick, savory sauce. It looks a bit intimidating because of the volume of noodles but you simply mix everything together, and the sauce softens up the noodles. Aside from how tasty the sauce is, the best part definitely has to be the texture of the noodles. It's crispy but once it mixes with the sauce, it becomes so chewy giving it the perfect soft-on-the-outside-firm-on-the-inside texture. 

If you're looking for noodles to serve this Chinese New Year, I definitely recommend this one. Kung Hei Fat Choi!