Pinoy Life At Large

Bulalo is a dish of boiled beef leg, with the marrow included. Boiling usually takes many hours, but the job is faster with a pressure cooker, though I think it still takes more than an hour to get that fall-off-the-bone goodness. Compared to Nilagang Baka (literally translated also means boiled beef), Bulalo hardly has any vegetable accompaniments. Mostly just the leg and the soup, which when done right gives a “milky” taste mostly because some bone marrow mixes with the soup. Nilagang Baka uses mostly the upper beef shank and is usually very lean with small amounts of fat and collagen for flavor. Vegetables are added to nilagang baka for better sustenance. But the bulalo is just plain food hedonism. All the goodness of the beef and fat mixed with marrow in a delicious steaming bouillon. And I drove 45 kilometers to Tagaytay City in Cavite to sample this wonderful dish.

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This weekend, bloggers and media people were treated to a leisure and food tour of Tagaytay, where Anton Diaz shared with us his favorite food destinations. First stop was breakfast at the clubhouse of Verdana Homes in Mamplasan, Laguna. Not so far from Makati, this Ayala community is indeed a great place to raise a family.

From there, we proceeded to Ilog Maria, a honeybee farm that also produced toiletries and beauty products, all infused with honey. Noreen complained after using the facial scrub that she bought. She will have to travel to Tagaytay to buy more of it, because it works so well on her face. She has decided to stop using Aveeno, and switch to the Ilog Maria Honey Facial Scrub. I actually loved using the Spearmint Oatmeal soap they gave us as part of the freebies pack. With these alone, I will definitely go back to Tagaytay before I run out of the soap.

But because I’m a foodie, this post will talk about the wonderful lunch that we had. We had lunch at Bawai Vietnamese Kusina. It’s a very hidden restaurant and because of its location, not all are aware of this foodie gem.

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