Cabancalan Cooler

Firstly, sorry about the lousy photo. I'm no photographer by any means.

Anyway, this is a cooling rum drink that I invented. It's absolutely perfect (in moderation) on hot, tropical afternoons. It's a bit sweet and slightly sour.

Ingredients:

Tanduay Dark or 5 Year Old Rhum, or any other darker or golden rum

Mixed orange and mango juices (I use 8 O'Clock brand juice powdered mix)

1/2 calamansi or a small lime wedge

Ice

Instructions:

Pour two fingers' worth of rum into a tall tumbler

Squeeze the calamansi or lime into the rum to get the juice, then discard

Add fruit juice until the glass is about 2/3 full. Stir.

Add ice cubes and stir again.

Enjoy!


N.B. I named this after the barangay in which I live.

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.

Pinakbet

Pinakbet

Pinakbet is a wonderful vegetable medley that's famous throughout the Philippines though its largely unknown outside of the country, unlike adobo and lumpia. It's very delicious and good for you.

Pinakbet (pronounced pin-AHK-bet) consists of a little pork (or chicken, or shrimp), winter squash or pumpkin, ampalaya (bitter gourd), green beans, okra and eggplant, seasoned with bagoong (Philippine shrimp paste) as well as the usual garlic, onions and broth. Beaten eggs are often added during the last part of cooking. The somewhat sweet flavor of the squash contrasts nicely with the slight bitterness of the ampalaya, and the firm and slightly crunchy texture of the green beans with the slight mushiness of the eggplant and okra.

In the Philippines we buy ready-made pinakbet mixture, consisting of all the vegetables (except garlic and onions, which are considered spices or seasonings rather than veggies in their own right) already cut up, so I'll have to kind of guess at proportions when telling you how to prepare it from scratch, but here goes (you'll probably have to buy your ampalaya and bagoong at a Filipino or Asian market, and I have no idea how or where you're going to find winter squash, okra and green beans in season at the same time, by the way):

Mongo Madness variant

My wife had been craving my Mongo Madness but I decided to do it a little differently this time, just for a change. Besides the ingredients I normally use, I added coconut milk and tumeric powder to make a kind of curry. Sort of.

I went out and bought two fresh coconuts. The ladies who were selling these cut a hole into the husked coconuts and poured the coconut water into plastic bags which had been temporarily placed inside a large plastic cup. Then, using a bolo (Philippine machete) the cut the coconuts in half and scraped out the fresh meat which was placed inside another bag. I took these bags home and ran everything through our blender then strained it to make homemade coconut milk. (I actually added too much of the coconut water, so my coconut milk came out a bit too watery. Oh, well, live and learn. This was my first attempt.)

I also added five silis (fresh, medium-hot green peppers) and six little red peppers, like Thai peppers. These gave my mongos just enough of a "bite" without actually being all that hot or spicy.

I used probably around four or five tablespoons of tumeric (I didn't measure, I just put.) I don't think my wife was all that crazy about it as she didn't rave over it or mention how good it was as she normally does, but I liked it just the same.

(My mother-in-law who lives next door once gave us some mongos that she'd made, with coconut milk, sili and tinapa (a kind of smoked, dried fish.) It was very delicious! I was trying to emulate that plus use up the tumeric that we already had. In restrospect, I should have asked the m-i-l how to make the coconut milk, I suppose.)

Sorry, I didn't take a picture this time. :)