For a working mom like me, there really are times when there is so much work to do that I couldn’t afford to cook something tedious to prepare. Kaldereta and the likes are definitely for the weekends. Well at least if we are not rushing to meet deadlines. It’s a good thing we don’t have a boss and home is just downstairs.
Here is a simple stir-fry recipe. I craved for cashew nuts few days ago and still have a pack which I bought at the neighborhood Russian store.
Every ethnic group has what it calls ‘soul food’ – soothing, comfort food that brings back warm memories of family dinners. Source: A History of Soul Food If you ask an African-American, as the term ‘soul food’ originated from the … Continue reading Lasang Pinoy 4 – Sinaing na Tulingan as Soul Food & my Tulingan Pasta
Pakbet or pinakbet is probably the most famous Ilocano dish. It is also one of the very first dishes that I learned to cook at age… 8 or 9? I forgot. I did overcook the vegetables a few times before Dad finally told me they don’t have to be always overdone. Well, they ate my pakbet delightfully during those times, maybe just to show some appreciation.
Below is based on my sister’s recipe though it isn’t exactly how our Ilocano dad cooks it. I already have a habit of frying the garlic before the pork which, in dad’s case, is the other way around. With the bitterness of ampalaya or bittergourd, my sister gave me an advice on how to get rid of it. Different from what dad taught us, which is to salt it for about 10 minutes. Ate instructed me not to stir once this vegetable is added to the cooking pan. She did just that when she visited us here in Beijing few months ago and proved her point. She said she got the trick from a friend who said the vegetable is a common ingredient in their household cooking.
I have loads of food pictures in my files but I chose this chicken recipe as I happen to run through an article about bird flu. Apparently, China closes all Beijing poultry markets.
Tsk tsk. What’s gonna happen w/ all the KFCs around when there are more than a hundred outlets in Beijing alone? There was also another article that says they open over 250 restaurants a year in China and operates in every Chinese province and region except Tibet. Hmmmm… but then, they were asked to stay out of Tibet.
Just when I am having some serious craving for chicken curry. Anyways, here’s my chicken hamonado recipe similar to my pork hamonado.
Carbonara is one of the few pasta dishes that I know how to prepare and has always been a favorite. I guess it’s one of the most basic pasta dishes in Italian cuisine. Here are myths and important tips you may not have been aware of. And, oh. By the way, I played the teacher’s role by showing my sister the procedure the last time she was here.
Yeah yeah. I’m talking about the Chinese date or ziziphus jujube. Ate Vi brought us some and I couldn’t stop munching. They’re sweet & so addicting. Fresh dates are crisp like apples. The fresh fruit is relatively new to me as I am more familiar w/ the dried ones but actually it has been in cultivation in China for about 4,000 years with over 400 cultivars! Inferior seedlings have traveled beyond Asia centuries ago and were brought into Europe at the beginning of the Christian era but the improved selections were introduced to the US only by 1908. Probably the … Continue reading I had a Date – Chinese, Fresh and Sweet
As I have been exposed to Chinese-Malay food for quite sometime and developed a craving to it to a certain degree, some Filipino dishes that I usually prepare has mutated into a mixture of different cuisines that I now have difficulty identifying them. One of these is my fried rice recipe. A former boss (he’s Chinese-Bruneian) once volunteered to cook fried rice for midnite makan as we were rushing to finish a project. Now it is something that I prepare for breakfast or even lunch. As always, I am on the lookout for the easy-to-cook dish.
As a child, the norm is to stir-fry cooked rice w/ garlic. We may crack an egg, add a teaspoon of soy sauce & stir the rice w/ it as another way of doing it and that’s about it. Here, I still do the browning of garlic to bring out the aroma as a tribute to what sinangag (Filipino for fried rice) really is, and then proceed to all the Chinese stuff. The fried egg topping is definitely Malay inspired. I could have easily called it nasi goreng istimewa (Malay for special fried rice) but that has dilis or dried small fish & shrimp paste, and worth of another blog post.
Sounds like there’s a party huh? Actually, we took my sister for lunch to our favorite Singaporean restaurant along Donzhimenwai Street just after our trip to the Ritan Park & Cean’s sports day activities. They serve peranakan or baba nyonya that reminds us of our years in Southeast Asia which explains our usual craving for Chinese-malay food. We ordered our favorite kway teow, satay ayam & beef rendang. Kway teow are fried flat noodles, especially popular in Singapore, Malaysia & Brunei. Satay ayam or skewered chicken in peanut sauce is basically Malay food. Beef rendang, on the other hand, is a dish that I usually identify w/ our beef caldereta. Of course it has a different flavor, which they say, has shallot, ginger, lemon grass paste, ground coriander, cumin, and nutmeg.
The serving was really huge that we almost couldn’t finish everything. The beef rendang was delicious but spicy that we decided to tapaw (take-out) half of it. We are not really a bunch of chilli lovers so for dinner, I did some make-over. I add onions, tomatoes, garlic and string beans plus a cup of water to the beef rendang to lessen the chili flavor. I also prepared deep-fried codfish fillet as I was inspired by my conversation w/ my cousin in Australia whom I chatted with thru YM. For some reason, we always end up talking about food every time we see each other online. He mentioned that a favorite down under is to oven-grill fish (I forgot, was it salmon?) marinated w/ lemon juice, salt & pepper.
This post is for the Food Blogging Event: LASANG PINOY 3 – Pinoy Street Food.
What would be my favorite street food? Trick question. I was what you call the all-too-obedient child at home while the street kid-type once unleashed. When we were young I don’t recall our parents ever buy us any kind of food being sold in the streets with the exception of sorbetes or ‘dirty’ ice cream, balut, penoy & nilagang itlog ng pugo (boiled quail eggs), which I fancied most before grade school. I could devour a whole pack, which I remember contained about 5 to 6 pieces, during any bus or jeepney ride.
In school (recess period & after class), we would buy all kinds of stuff – cotton candy, scramble (crushed ice w/ sorta fruit juice & coloring), sa malamig (any cold drinks from fruit juice to gulaman at sago or gelatin and tapioca balls) , manggang hilaw w/ alamang (unripe mango w/ unsauteed shrimp paste), kalikot (I suppose it’s coconut jam picked & eaten from a piece of bamboo stem), & ofcourse the ever popular fishballs. I remember spending my entire food allowance for these fried well-seasoned balls of ground fish, day after day, at least for a year maybe. When we got a little bit older, our folks would buy taho (made from bean curd w/ sago & arnibal, a sweet syrup) and puto (rice cake) so I don’t really think they hate ‘street food’ per se. I guess it’s more of the responsibility that goes w/ being parents.
During HS & university days when food allowance was better, my preferred street food became barbeque – pork, hotdogs & the radical inihaw na isaw ng manok or chicken intestine barbeque). In college, we had series of overnight jobs working on projects as a team. These would be like all work, work, work, and rest would be during meals or snacks. There were instances when we will just set off to our favorite barbeque stall for merienda. Buy ice-cold coke poured into plastics from the nearest store & eat right there while queuing for our isaw. I remember a particular street in San Andres Bukid, Manila near the railways & the South Expressway. Never been there for a long time. Hope somebody would tell me if that particular place of barbeque stalls is still there. (Isaw photo courtesy of Karen.)
Continue reading “Lasang Pinoy 3 – Marbleized Quail Eggs or Tea Eggs”
My sister requested for a chicken & mushroom dish for lunch so we grabbed some ingredients from the nearest supermarket & I cooked it following my instincts. I chose to do it the Chinese style, taking into consideration how I remember it ala-Ate Vi (Ate Vi as in Vivian), our Chinese interpreter. She lived w/ us for about 3 months during the infamous SARS period for health measures as we all self-quarantined.As she said, the Chinese style (meaning northern Chinese, Beijing included, w/c is so much different from the Chinese food we are so familiar with back home or in any other southeast Asian country) is to cook w/ lots of cooking oil over high heat to enhance the flavor of the food. To avoid splatters of hot oil, add a dash of salt on the oil before frying anything. I tried it, especially when frying fish & it is really quite factual. But of course I didn’t follow the ‘lots of cooking oil’ tip 
Well here’s a dish that I cooked when my sister visited me here recently – spare ribs stew & steamed veggies – similar to my pork hamonado recipe.
By this time, I’ve already moved 3x! Anyways, just scroll down to read more about the recipe!
Welcome to my new site! I got the idea from Mike (thanks to u) who few days ago moved his blog. Just bear w/ me ’cause I’m not yet done w/ customization & everything. Right now you may find links to the Lasang Pinoy Food Events, a page dedicated to pinoy food bloggers and another one that shows random feeds from their RSS/Atom enabled sites. i know that my list isn’t complete, I am still new in this blog world, so anybody out there I missed out pls let me know, email me. I would also like to invite you pinoy bloggers out there to join the 3rd Lasang Pinoy event about pinoy street food. You may also find in the sidebar a poll related to it. Everybody is welcome to participate!
Back to my food blogging…
I guess the way to start this site is to blog about the Filipino curry that I’ve always loved. I never liked the Indian curry in some southeast asian countries but I’ve learned to love the nyonya version. I even like it spicy. Moreover, the Beijing counterpart is very much similar to ours. But what’s embarrassing for me is that I’ve experimented on this recipe only recently. This isn’t a dish common in our dining table and recipes online vary so I just decide which ingredient to add or omit and my version ended up w/ tomatoes & ginger & green bell pepper. Anyways, it turned out quite good that my sister, who just visited me here in Beijing for 3 weeks, said she’s gonna tell mom & dad how good my cooking is nowadays.
This post is for the Food Blogging Event: LASANG PINOY 2 – Cooking Up a Storm, food you associate with typhoons, hurricanes, or storms. I guess it is also noteworthy to mention here my very successful invitation to Mike of La Fang to join Lasang Pinoy 2. All I did was just show him the link to Lasang Pinoy 1 (hosted remarkably by Karen & Stef) and voila! He’s in! It’s also quite a feat to influence that busy guy to even start food-blogging by showing him my own amateurish blog. For a minute I really thought I must have been a successful salesperson in another life.
Would it be easy to remember those rainy days back home? Though much has been said about China’s rainy season for the past months which has led to serious flooding in the north-east and south of the country that I have been asked several times if we are ok here in Beijing, it’s interesting to point out that a typical rainy day here is way too tame compared to one back home. Still, I remember lots of food that I could associate w/ stormy weather but quite impossible for me to cook/prepare in Beijing. These are the following:
1. tuyo or dried fish combined with salted tomatoes – tuyo not being available here.
2. fried galunggong (mackerel scad) & monggo (mung bean) – galunggong not available here & w/ monggo… mike you beat me to the punch!
3. fried daing na bangus (milkfish cut lengthwise along the back but not breaking the skin) – aside from the fact that I am still looking for that fish here, it was already an entry last month
4. unripe (and sour) mango w/ [i]bagoong[/i] (shrimp paste or fermented salted shrimps) – mangoes oh how I miss my tropical homeland
5. hot chocolate made of tablea (chocolate tablets made from cacao beans) or kapeng barako (brewed coffee made of liberica bean variety) from Batangas (my mom’s hometown) – the closest here would be starbucks
Continue reading “Lasang Pinoy 2: Pritong Tilapia & Talong con Kamatis at Bagoong”
Never thought that I would be like some kind of a superwoman – a full-time mom & working at the same time. For some reasons, my son’s nanny won’t be joining us any sooner than expected so I continue to be his ‘school bus’, as well as the cook for months to come. With few projects that need to be checked from time to time, there would be plenty of occasions when I have to cook something that is easy to prepare as well as satisfy my small family’s appetite for food. An example is what I will share here – ‘fast food’ that’s ready in about 10 minutes.
My pork & peapods saute is actually similar to any stir-fry vegetable recipe except that the Italian herbs add a special flavor that doesn’t make the dish taste oriental. A trick I learned from a colleague who tried adding the same herbs to the simple ginisang sitaw or stir-fry string beans.
For somebody like me who is new in the world of blogs & bloggers, it’s a pleasure to be tagged by Karen for this meme, which by the time I was informed about it, it was like whoa! What is a meme? I was absolutely clueless. I don’t even know how it is supposed to be pronounced. So I quickly researched for the meaning & came up w/ this (just for the few people out there like me who doesn’t know).