Batangas, Part Two: Tuklasin ang Taal

Here’s part two of  the Carnation Family Food Trip, hosted in cooperation with Appetite magazine. After we visited the Shrine of Our Lady of Caysasay (which means kingfisher) and the Sta. Luicia Well…

The fisher queen

We said hello to the penguin that stands outside the shrine (What the statue of an antartic bird is doing in a tropical country, I don’t know. It’s cute, though)…

The Penguin of Caysasay

Visited the Basilica of San Martin…

And had lunch at the Escuela Pia cultural Center. From the ‘escuela’ part of its name, my guess is that it used to be a school.

Escuela Pia

Where we were greeted by awesome Batanguenas,

Note cute boy in the background

And treated to lunch, which consisted of:

Adoo sa Luyang Dilaw (Adobo with yellow ginger, here quite milky because of the added milk (this is a Carnation trip, after all), though they had the original, milkless version too), Tapang Taal, Inihaw na Tilapia (grilled tilapia) and Bulanlang, a vegetable salad called Dinengdeng in the North

And various desserts, including minatamis na saba (sweetened bananas) my personal favorite being the Champorado (chocolate rice porridge) with Ice Cream and Carnation. I was fortunate to get the very last bowl. The champorado was thick, its sweetness provided by the accompanying ice cream while its texture was thinned by the milk. The rice was soft, but not gooey. I want to know who made it so I can kidnap him or hr and make her my official champorado cook.

But the best part of the meal was…

The coffee! Never have I tasted coffee so fragrant, good, you didn’t have to put  sugar in it because it was naturally sweet. When I asked the servers where I could get beans, they looked at me as if I was crazy and said, “the market.” Now I know what really good coffee tastes like. This is the taste I try to replicate at home. I’m succeeding, little by little, thanks to the barako beans Luis’ dad brought from Batangas.

But we didn’t just spend our days in Taal stuffing ourselves. We saw some stuff too, which I will post tomorrow.