here's a dish that will always fill a hungry stomach and make taste buds happy.

roughly chop half a white onion and two tomatoes. scramble 2 eggs. season the eggs with a bit of salt and pepper.

in a non-stick pan, heat some olive oil (extra virgin may be a bit too strong, so don't use it or use it sparingly). throw in the onions and after a 2-3 minute pause, add the tomatoes. season with salt, pepper and basil. let sit until slightly mushy.

put in the eggs. you may let the eggs sit so you'll end up with a neatly formed fritata, or you can do what i do which is stir the whole thing around until it the egg is all broken up.

serve hot.

if you want to go fancy, you can have this with french or italian bread and a glass of a fruity white wine. comfort food merienda though necessitates either sinangag, tasty, or (what else) skyflakes all washed down with juice.

this is good for the soul, really. 

(yes, karlo, i plagiarized your entry title. that's what you get for calling me insane. hehe)

i made my way to santi's along timog which i heard has a fairly decent wine selection. ah, santi's - one of the very few places that can make me feel immense regret at my equally immensely puny salary. so much great stuff! cheeses, hams from all over the world, even just the olive oil selection is worth ogling. every foodie's dream come true. oh well...

so back to the wine.

i entered their vinotek and was immediately pleased. the wine was arranged by country and for some reason i find that much better than had they been arranged say, by grape. there wasn't too much - the room was just about 3 x 3 meters - but what was there should keep me looking for quite a while yet.

i ended up with a half bottle (thank goodness for those!) of red from beaujolais villages, 2005 vintage, georges duboeuf winemaker. for P277. on my way out i picked up 100 grams of australian gouda for P79 and happily set up an elegant wine and cheese session for less than P500. yes, the cheese was cheap - the dutch gouda was going for about P120 hehe. i'm a public school teacher, remember.

the great bonus was when i found out that 2005 is an excellent vintage for beaujolais - 5 stars on the official internet site. with that thought i happily opened the cork (with my waiter's corkscrew thus tempting a mild flirtation with tendinitis) and poured.

the first thing i'll say about this wine is it needs quite a bit of air. 5-10 minutes is the usual standard for red and you should stick to it, otherwise the wine will be way too oak-y. next is that the wine doesn't go too well with shrimp (i had gambas with it). the woodiness of the wine just didn't cut it.

but it went very very well with the cheese. so there you go. a really good cheese platter accompaniment.

oh, and - serious foodies will kill me for this - it also goes nicely with granny goose barbecue and cheese tortilla chips.

there were no classes yesterday because of the storm. decided to play a round of scrabble and monopoly to pass the afternoon.

joanna and i hit the supermarket to load on munchies. after going around the junk food aisle we ended up with chippy, cheez curls, richee, jack and jill pretzels, choco mallows, tim tams, two kinds of potato chips, clover chips, nagaraya cracker nuts, and extra chili peewee chips. oh, and a pint of ice cream.

joanna looks into the basket and asks: "do you think we have enough?"

we burst out laughing, but a couple of hours later only the clover chips and the peewee still exist. 

i swear i've still got a little ache around my kidneys.

after this month, i won't be having pizza until late october.

that's because for a couple of weeks starting october 20, i'll be having nothing but, as that's most likely the only thing i'll be able to afford.

ciao italia!  

got a half bottle of white recently. cotes du rhones by georges duboeuf (i realized that santi's only carries half bottles from this winery). my still unschooled taste liked it. it was a bit oaky and i'm now thinking that is a quality of french wines because the stuff i've tried from chile, italy and australia aren't as woody. so the cotes du rhones was on the woody side but quite light and smooth.

i got to appreciate it more when i had a glass of white at one of my favorite restaurants. a semillion-chardonnay from south africa, which had no nose at all. and the palate? well, it didn't have much of a personality.

but that half bottle. pretty good. try it with sharp or old cheeses. 

and that's it for my wine purchasing. need to save the cash haha. i will catch up on my vino tasting when i hit italia where the wine is, literally, cheaper than water.