Back to Work
I still feel a little woozy, I think I need a few more days to completely recover. I just finished a few layouts and I’m already pretty tired. It feels like I just came from a really bad hangover (like one of those nights when you just hug the bowl and say, “God, I promise I’ll never do this again”) but anyway, I couldn’t stay home another day, I wanted to get moving or else I’d probably feel worse. The weird part is that I haven’t had any alcohol for the past couple of days…maybe weeks.
When I got to Cafe Ysabel, I was really hungry, so I decided to have something humongous. I remembered one of chef Paul’s (Animel!) favorites in Cafe — Stephen’s Tortang Talong Sarsiado.
Yes we have tortang talong. It’s funny how our restaurant just has a bunch of different kinds of food. It used to just be part of our breakfast menu until our regulars began looking for it at lunch time and even dinner.
The eggplant is shaped like a box. Outside it looks like a brilliantly made omelet. On top of chicken rice, with chicken tocino and sauteed tomato salsa on the side. I think the cooks have perfected the chicken tocino, it’s soft, slightly sweet and salty with good caramelization that adds a rounded out flavour. The inside of the eggplant is ground pork with spices and a little roasted pepper, which complements the egg and tomato salsa, making a wonderful and heavy…brunch?
I feel like I ate a elephant. I’ve been on an odd diet for a couple of days that I just wanted to gorge on something comforting haha!
I have a very big dilemma. I posted a note on my photography group for a photo-op with food styling to build our portfolio’s last week…i said maybe a few photographers would be good, and I got an amazing response of over 30 photographers! Now I don’t know what to do. One on one with a photographer is hard enough. We’ll see what happens. I have to schedule this gig properly. 
Mariano L Honrado is my first cousin. It is interesting how he juxtaposed 3 items in one cropped photo while giving credence to a composition that does not negate any one of them. The genes are in our family.
The photos of the food made me hungry and happy while hungry at seeing them very colorfully presented. I have a series of paintings on the cocktail drinks stylized so that the wine glasses are tipped to splash some “spirits”
out of the glass.
Congratulations and thanks for sharing