That Jolly Bee

This isn’t my first Jollibee experience, but it’s my first at a Jollibee in the Philippines, and I think that can be important. My first Jollibee experience was in the Middle East, and it was okay, but not great. There were two problems with that visit that were completely eliminated this time around. The first issue was my own, I didn’t know what to order. It seems like a silly problem, you should be able to order anything on a menu at a fast food restaurant and enjoy it. The reality is that it’s not the case. Fast food restaurants offer different items for different tastes, and some items are more popular than others. The popular (or better) items may not be intuitive to people unfamiliar with the restaurant or the culture where that restaurant originated. In other words, I ordered a burger at Jollibee the first time I went and it wasn’t great.

The second problem when I visited Jollibee in the Middle East is an issue with importation. One of the balancing acts fast food places must do when expanding outside of their original country of origin is authenticity versus adaptation. Authenticity is the attempt to offer customers at their new restaurants the same thing that they had at their original restaurants. Adaptation is the barriers you have in this new country, which could include limited ingredients, staff that may not have experience cooking and serving that food and dinners who may not like all of the aspects of the food you're serving. It can be very complicated and can lead to the experience I had at the Middle Eastern Jollibee.

This time however I was not only prepared (I know the fried chicken is the thing to eat), but being in the Philippines I know I’m getting the real deal. My experience this time was totally better. First of all the chicken is amazing, juicy on the inside and a nice crunchy coating. We had 3 pieces of chicken between the two of us and there wasn’t a bad one.

The spaghetti is the one item I ordered from both the Middle East Jollibee and the one in the Philippines. The difference was pretty significant. I remember the spaghetti in the Middle East being sticky and over cooked. The cheese was also not as plentiful and I could be wrong but I don’t think it was the same kind of cheese. It could be the quality of the cooking, or just my imagination, but the sauce this time didn’t seem as sweet. Don’t get me wrong, Filipino spaghetti sauce is very sweet compared to western spaghetti sauce, but this didn’t feel like I was eating sugar glazed spaghetti.

We also decided to try out the desserts this time, since I heard the pies are amazing. We also got a cookie sundae as well. The sundae was good, but the pie was excellent. While Allison actually preferred the sundae, I thought the sundae was fairly average with the two improvements being the quality of the cookie bits and the fact that they used a hard shell chocolate sauce. The pie on the other hand was perfect. The filling tasted a bit more like peach than mango, but frankly I really enjoyed that. The crust was crunchy and deep fried (seriously why did McDonald's start baking their pies in some countries), delicious!

It was a fine meal, and as of writing this we still have a few days left here in the Philippines and another stop at Jollibee is completely possible. I’m not sure how I feel about attempting another Jollibee outside of the Philippines, because of my previous experience. This did however make me think about a few of the other fast food and restaurant chains I’ve tried outside of their country of origin, particularly the ones that I didn’t really like that much… I’m looking at you Hardee’s.

10 Second Kitchen, It's Been A Little While

We haven't posted a new episode of 10 Second Kitchen in a while, but I'm hoping that changes. I've got some ideas about how to expand this little video project, and I hope you enjoy what we have to offer.

Make sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter so you can see where we might be filming new episodes of 10 Second Kitchen.

And be sure to subscribe to our YouTube feed to see the episodes as soon as we put them up.

CC

Amazing Candy/Junk Food Things That You Should Buy - Taco Train

You wouldn't think that there would be a way to make Tacos more entertaining, but here we are.

CC

10 Second Kitchen - Street Vendor On Street 51

I'm not sure what these little patties are called, but they're yummy.

Find out where I saw this on our Candy Critic map.

CC

10 Second Kitchen - Street 244 and Street 19

Drying meat in the sun is a common occurrence in Cambodia. I've been tempted to try eating the results some time, but frankly I'm not sure if my stomach could handle it.

Find out where we shot this video on our Candy Critic map.

CC

10 Second Kitchen - Sovanna

This is actually one of the most popular restaurants in Cambodia, every night the streets fill up just to get a table here.

Make sure to check out the candy map to find out where this is.

CC

Something Smells Like Dinner... Oh It's You.

Have you ever dreamed of smelling like a slow cooked roast beef? It doesn't appeal to me, but Allison would probably appreciate it.

CC

A Pizza (Not) Candy Pool Thing

You have to buy at least 8 of these so you can have a whole pizza.

CC

A Valentines Day Candy Thing

Am I the only person in the world that thinks Lego is one of the best gifts you can get for Valentine's Day?  I particularly like that this set is not only romantic, but it comes with Lego cupcakes.

CC

Sri Lankan Snacking

When we planned our trip to Sri Lanka, I had no idea what to expect.  This goes for the sites we would see as well as the food we would eat.  For a while I was thinking of taking Allison's advice and just taking a vacation and not thinking about the food.  Being a food writer you find yourself constantly thinking about the food you eat even if you're not "working".  In the end I decided that I would write about the food, but I wouldn't search for things as much as I would let them present themselves.

The first thing you should keep in mind is that we spent almost all of our time in two different type of place, either we were in tourist places, or we were in transportation type places (bus stops and train stations).  I'm sure that this has a pretty strong effect on the kind of foods we saw and ate.  In particular I know it played a huge role in the types of snacks and candies we came across.  There was one kind of snack in particular that comes to mind, and that will be forever engraved in my memory as a Sri Lankan snack.

Travel snacks were a huge part of our trip, and something we came across many times on our adventure.  It could have been a kiosk in front of a train or bus station selling nuts and other salty snacks, or it could be the guy with the huge basked of fried foods walking through our train car at a station.  Travel snacks are all over the place, and there's a huge variety to choose from.

The main thing you find on the outside of train stations is fruit and nuts, I'll talk more about the fruit later on in this post.  The nuts and salty snacks available for you to buy before getting on your train and bus were fantastic.  From simple salted peanuts, to complex mixtures of dried roots and vegetables mixed with nuts and what appears to be hard noodle like crunchy bits.  The variety was huge, and the flavours very diverse.  The only similarity many of these snacks had was spice.  All of them had some kind of hot spicy element, some more than others.  Other than that the flavour came from so many different spices from caraway seeds, to onion, just about anything you might find in a great curry dish.

The deep fried snacks on our travels were similar to donuts, only savoury.  These donut like pastries could be flavoured with hot peppers, dried vegetables, even full sized shrimps on some occasions.  They were very greasy, served hot, and much like the other snack foods, always a little spicy.  I wasn't as big a fan of these myself, but I can certainly see the appeal.

I mention before that fruit stands were all around the bus and train stations as well.  Most people seemed to go with lychee fruit on the trains, probably because of the simplicity of eating them.  However I wanted to go a little further with the fruit in Sri Lanka than just the train and bus stations.  The fruit in this country is the best fruit I've ever eaten in my life.  The pineapples are amazing, the bananas are some of the best I've ever had, and the papaya was perfect.  Every morning I would make sure to load up on fruit for breakfast when I could.  I ate so much fruit that it started to "affect" my stomach, but I just couldn't stop.

The quality of the fruit in Sri Lanka ties into another strange thing I noticed in this country, there aren't many chocolate bars or regular sugar candies available.  I think there are two reasons for this, first of all the heat would melt many candies (however this can be sorted out using refrigeration), but the other reason I suspect is the quality of the fruit.  Why would you want to eat a pineapple candy when the pineapple itself is always available and always tasty.  I believe that the fruit in this country may be the local kids candy, fortunately it's healthier for them, and in some cases it literally grows on trees around them.

The other food in Sri Lanka was actually a little disappointing.  We had a hard time nailing down the Sri Lankan flavour, and found ourselves often surrounded with British, Italian, and Indian food.  The only thing that we ate that we felt really represented the country was the sauces.  At a few small curry shops we got our flat breads or pancakes with our curries, and delivered on the side were various chutneys and coconut milk sauces.  These flavours took these simple curries to the next level.  In some cases I found myself skipping the curries and just dipping my breads into the sauces.

The final, and maybe most important reason any foodie should visit Sri Lanka is the tea.  Head into the mountains near Kandy (seriously the best name ever for a town) or Nuwara Eliya and you'll be surrounded with tea.  Teashops, tea tours, and most importantly tea plantations.  I would suggest at every stop in the mountain regions you make sure you get a cup of tea.  Not only is it sure to be high quality, but they brew their tea with such care and technique that it changes the flavour to something spectacular.  I can't say I had a single bitter cup of tea the entire trip, and the free cup of tea I received at the end of my tour of a tea factory was the best I'd ever had.

If you're thinking about visiting Sri Lanka for a foodie holiday you might want to think about it first.  As a place to visit it's spectacular, it's beautiful and the people are amazing.  As a foodie destination there are two reasons to go, the fresh fruit and the tea.  Everything else is fine, but the tea and the fruit are two things that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world.

CC

Cool Shaped Pasta

I think I want to try and discover the greatest shapes for pasta ever created.  So far this collection is number 1, have you seen better?

CC

Chris Stuffing His Face - Fries

Remember last week I stuffed my face with a burger?  Well here's the fries that went on the side.

CC

Chris Stuffing His Face - Burger

Have you ever eaten a hamburger when you weren't hungry.  You're out and about and it's getting close to dinner, you know you have nothing at home ready to eat, so you think a burgers a good idea.  You're not hungry yet, but if you go home, you know you won't be interested in going back out to get a burger, because you're kind of lazy.  So the only choice is to get the burger, bring it back home, stall for as long as you can, but eventually eat that burger because you have to.

CC

The Importance Of After Dinner Candies

I don't think many restaurants give after dinner candies/sweets much thought.  For the most part I think they simply choose an inexpensive treat that stores well.  This is a bad idea, as any great chef will tell you every detail of a meal counts.  Often the first impression and last impression are the most important, and after dinner treats are the last bit of food restaurant customers will eat.  I would be silly to argue that a bad after dinner treat will completely ruin a great meal, however a great after dinner sweet will take your meal to an all new level.

In Greece, for example, many meals at local restaurants are finished with a small desert instead of little candies.  In the summer this dessert is often some fresh watermelon, and in the winter it can be home made halva or custard.  These desserts are given after the bill is delivered and every time I have a friend visiting, and these treats are delivered, they're blown away.  In these cases the meals are often great, but the extra high quality treat at the end brings the meal to another level.

One of the keys to fine dinning is repeat customers and word of mouth, if you surprise your guests with a high quality last bite I can assure you that you will see them again.

CC

Waffles Are Good Everywhere

I have yet to really eat a waffle that I did not like.  I eat them from frozen, I eat them made fresh.  I eat them with fruit, with cheese, and especially with chocolate.  I eat them for breakfast, as a snack, and even for lunch.  I've eaten them in Europe, Asia, and North America, and I'm sure they're good in other places too.  I think that the waffle might be one of the best foods ever.

CC

Cookies and Crepes

The other night I decided that a sweet crepe would be the perfect dinner.  Sure it's not healthy, but sometimes you just have to give into the craving.  As usual the main ingredient was Nutella, only because I find Nutella to be a crucial ingredient when it comes to modern dinner/dessert crepes.  The exception is of coarse morning breakfast crepes, in which case I would say that a cream or custard is then the essential ingredient.  My additional ingredient in this particular crepe was busted up pieces of cookie.  Now I love cookies, I love crepes, and I love Nutella, but together they're not really working for me.  I think the cookie makes the whole thing way too dry and it adds nothing to the flavour.

CC

Metsovo Greece

Allison and I took a day trip to the town of Metsovo in Greece.  It's really a nice place, beautiful mountains, great looking houses, and cool streets.  Best of all was the selection of candy available in many of the stores.  Almost all of it is hand made in small quantities.  It give you the feeling of care, and also the feeling that you're getting a really good quality treat.  I picked up a long bar of home made nougat that apparently is very popular in this region.  I'll have the review for it up next week during our special "Greek Treat Review-a-thon".

On a side note, during lunch we came across what I can only describe as not my cup of tea.  The things rotating on these spits is pork (or lamb), but that's not all.  The pork (or lamb) is then covered with intestines and slow cooked.  I can never understand why people want to eat things like intestines since they don't really give off a good flavour or texture.

CC

Vanilla Risotto... or Rice Pudding?

The other night a group of us decided to head to a slightly fancy restaurant here in Athens called Agora (it means market in Greek).  The meal was fantastic, and if you ever get the chance to try honey and cereal crusted goats cheese I highly recommend it.  Being the sweet treat fanatic that I am, I couldn't resist a desert, and when I saw "Vanilla Risotto" on the menu my mind was set.  The dish came and we all dug in, it was tasty, but in my head all I could really see and taste was basic rice pudding.  Sure it had some chocolate sauce and cookies crumbled on top, and it was nice and warm, but I'm not sure why you would call it "vanilla risotto".

CC

New Taco Bell In Athens

My friend Alex and I decided that we would check out a new mall that just opened up here in Athens.  One of the attractions of this new mall is the first ever Taco Bell in Greece. Alex had never tried Taco Bell before and he was very excited, I on the other hand feared for my life.

The first strange thing that happened in line at the Taco Bell had to be the menu we where provided.

It contained nice pictures and descriptions of all the Taco Bell regular treats.

The food itself was pretty much what I come to expect from Taco Bell... You can insert your own opinion here.

Since I haven't been to a Taco Bell in a long time (since high school probably) I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected, in particular seeing it as something new through the eyes of my friend.  I also enjoyed the crazy slogans they have plastered all over everything, including this one on the napkin.

CC

Best Ketchup Bottle Design Ever

Look at this awesome ketchup bottle that we found at the restaurant 'Gourmet Burger. I 'can't understand why this is not the standard for ketchup bottles instead of just a red tube. Do people not know that ketchup is made from tomatoes, is this something we're trying to hide? This does lead to one question though, if a ketchup bottle is supposed to look like a tomato, what should a mustard bottle look like?

CC