Adobo

Adobo

The name "adobo" comes from a Spanish cooking technique of first marinating meat then stewing it in its marinade. When the Spaniards saw Filipinos making their traditional dish in a similar manner they called it "adobo" and the name stuck. In fact, no one even knows what the original Filipino name was.

The marinade consists basically of soy sauce and vinegar, with black pepper or peppercorns, onions, garlic and bay leaves added. Most people combine these ingredients into the marinade, let the meat sit in it for a period of time then stew the meat in it. But I learned a little secret from another cook: how to get the meat to come out moist and tender rather than hard and dry as it usually does. That is to leave the vinegar out of the marinade, and only add it during the last few minutes of cooking time! Very untraditional, but apparently the acidity of the vinegar does something to the meat that causes it to be drier and tougher. (Yes, I know that many people recommend marinading tough cuts of meat in lemon juice or vinegar as a tenderizer. I don't pretend to understand it: all I know is that adobo cooked in this way comes out tender and juicy.)

Adobo comes in two varieties: adobong baboy (pork adobo) and adobong manok (chicken adobo.) Both are prepared identically, the only difference being the meat used. You can even mix the two meats if you like.

Bicol Express

Named after a train route between Bicol and Manila, this rather spicy dish is more or less the Philippine's version of Thai curry. Or something. Anyway, it's delicious. It's basically pork meat with hot peppers and green beans in a coconut cream sauce (coconut cream is a thicker, richer version of coconut milk.)

The only exotic ingredients are bagoong (Philippine shrimp paste) and the coconut milk and cream. I'll tell you how you can make your own of the latter, in case you can't find any in stores.

Bistek

Bistek

 

 

Here's a dish I haven't had in a long time, mainly because quality beef is hard to find (and expensive) in the Philippines. It would be a great dish for Western cooks, though.

The name bistek actually just means "beef steak." Seriously. It's composed of thin slices of lean beef that have been marinated in a mixture of soy sauce and kalmansi juice, cooked in the marinade until tender, then cooked sliced onions added. It's really easy.

Banawa Express

Banawa Express

This is a very old, traditional Filipino dish that I made up three years ago. :) It's basically a stovetop version of a recipe that was given to me by a friend many years ago, for pork chops baked in a sauce made from cream of mushroom soup straight out of the can: no water added. It gets its extra juiciness from the meat juices. Pork chops cooked in this manner come out nice and tender, and the sauce is excellent when eaten as a gravy with mashed potatoes or rice.

Since the pork chops we get in the Philippines seem to be drier and thinner than those in the US I've taken to adding water, as well as a pork bouillon cube, a large chopped onion and several cloves of garlic. If the soup is a bit soupier than thicker as it is if no water is added, the sauce goes farther when spooned over rice: we eat a lot of rice with our meals in this country.

My wife loves this recipe. Her mother and sister, not so much: they think it "tastes funny." It was my wife who insisted I add it to my food blog. I made it two nights ago as a sort of celebration of my wife's recent promotion to supervisor at her job.

About the name: there's a Filipino dish called Bicol Express that's basically meat, chicken or fish cooked in coconut milk with fresh green chili peppers, sort of like a type of curry. At the time I first cooked my pork chop dish, we were living in a place called Banawa, so named after the small hillocks that the main road of the area crossed such that if you drove fast you'd always be going "banawa banawa banawa" as you went up and down these little hills. ("Banawa" is pronounced "bah-NAH-wah", not BAN-ah-wah, by the way.. ) So when my wife asked what the dish was called, I had to think of a name and I came up with Banawa Express.

Corned beef and scrambled eggs

I want to take a break from cooking and need a change from vegetable dishes so I plan to fix something simple tonight: canned corned beef and scrambled eggs, basically, breakfast for dinner as a serving of corned beef, rice and a cooked egg is a common breakfast dish in the Philippines.

The variety of available canned foods found here is, well, not what most ex-pats are used to in their home countries. You can find corned beef, carne norte (a variety of corned beef that's chopped up finer and contains more juice), Vienna sausages, tuna in various flavors, sardines in assorted flavors, pork and beans, SPAM, something called "beef loaf" which is a finely-ground meat product of some sort, plus a few favorite Filipino foods such as lechon paksiw and sisig. You can sometimes find things like canned soups (and not very many flavors of these: cream of mushroom, mainly) and vegetables in the regular old #2 size cans, but these are usually located in the Imported Foods aisle of a supermarket and they're rather expensive. You probably won't find very many canned convenience foods (meals in a can), such as Chef Boy-Ar-Di products, canned beef stew, tamales, "Chinese food" or lima beans with ham. No Spaghetti-Os!

The canned corned beef you find here is different than that in the US: chunkier and more flavorful. The cans are small, round 155 gram size rather than the larger, squarish cans that are opened with a key. You open these with a regular can opener. I actually prefer carne norte, which is both cheaper and tastier, but my wife likes corned beef because it has larger chunks of meat. Anyway, it's an easy and nourishing meal to eat occasionally if you want to take a break from vegetables.