When in Quezon

When in Quezon to visit family or anything else, do look around and enjoy what it has to offer. Don't treat it as just a stopover to Bicol and elsewhere.

 (I admit I wasn't a big fan of my home province before because it wasn't modern enough for my ignorant, city-bred ways or "provincial" enough like those bucolic peasant farm paintings... but thankfully, my eyes have been opened to its beauty.)

In Lucena City, Tayabas and Sariaya, check out the old houses that are still around. It's funny that we look for ancestral houses in Vigan and Bacolod, when so many of them are still in Quezon, if you just look around. Most of the well-preserved ones are in Sariaya and some of them are even open to the public! Kudos to the families who own these houses for not tearing down these heritage homes.

Cielin's Chocolate Cakes

I'm an avid follower of Anton Diaz's blog www.ourawesomeplanet.com so when I read his post about The battle of the "gasoline cakes" way back in 2006, I just had to try them out. I'm from the southern part of Metro Manila so I had already tasted Ms. Polly's chocolate cake. And lucky for me, the Caltex cake is on the way to where I work! So one day I bought one for the office. Too bad we didn't have camera phones then so I wasn't able to blog about it but it was a hit!

Simply seafood for Mama's birthday!

The plan was to eat at the dampa near the SM Mall of Asia with Twinx and family for Mama's birthday. But it was the first fiesta of our newly-formed parish of Padre Pio and Twinx's baby had a fever. So we didn't bother to buy our own seafood and went straight to Aling Tonya's to order from them.  The only problem with this is that you won't be able to choose your seafood and you won't know how much it costs until you get the bill. The only prices on the menu are how much their cooking fee is.