one filipino dish a week

I decided to throw a curveball this week and do two dishes. I can’t contain myself. I’m just excited. In going through with the theme of classic dishes, I decided to go with pinakbet. Growing up I wasn’t too much of a fan of this dish mainly because it has okra and ampalaya (bitter melon). To this day I’m still not a proponent for okra. I’m not too big on the slimey texture. In the essence of experimentation and open-mindedness (I did start off this whole thing with a dish that I’m not a fan of), I decided to make pinakbet.

As I started to search and learn more about this dish, I found that this is an Ilocano dish. This dish is fairly simple and is often compared to ratatouille. However, to make this dish authentically meant that I had to have a palayok (claypot), cook it over wood fire and ingredients like squash blossoms. Where am I going to get any of those in the middle of winter in Jersey City? So I opted for the not so authentic pinakbet. What an easy cop-out, blame it on winter.

As I was perusing through the Asian store the choices of ingredients didn’t really make me jump for joy. Once again I blame winter. There were only two pieces of ampalaya left. They looked pale, not as green as i remember them to be and slightly beat up. I asked the guy stocking the shelves if they had more and he said that they only got one box for the day. He tried to convince me that this was great produce. I wasn’t too thrilled but I was set on making the dish and so I had no choice. The long beans didn’t look like a healthy green either. They looked like dying green weeds. And still another moment where I wanted to just curse out old man winter. I got bagoong alamang (fermented shrimp paste) because that’s what I remember pinakbet to be but, from what I learned bagoong monamon (fermented fish paste) is the more authentic Ilocano ingredient. The unusual pinkish color of the shrimp paste would make a lot of non-Filipinos think twice about having this dish.  You don’t really see too may pink colored foods (other than cotton candy…but that’s a totally different post). The bagoong gives the dish the saltiness and gives it a distinctive smell.

So when I got home and The Girl helped me cut up the ingredients (ampalaya, acorn squash, long beans, okra, asian eggplant, zucchini and garlic). The ampalaya definitely didn’t look like what i thought it should look like. I don’t eve know where these came from. They’re probably shipped all the way from China (that’s where the garlic came from). Lastly, I used the remaining pork loin from the sinigang. The authentic Ilocano version calls for bagnet (pretty much a fried crispy pork belly).

I didn’t have a ceramic pot so the saute pan was the stand in. All the different ingredient incidents building up just seemed like a recipe for disaster (no pun intended). As I was cooking the dish The Girl was getting nervous and skeptical because the way I was cooking it was not how she has made it in the past. To cook this I was supposed to layer each vegetable with the hardest to cook first on the bottom, covered and it will pretty much steam in their own juice. And the pot is tossed and shaken to mix up the vegetables a couple of times.

The outcome was mediocre. The Girl and I could definitely taste that it was lacking. It had hints of pinakbet but it just was not quite there. You can really tell that garbage in, garbage out. The vegetables were not the freshest and you can tell in the finished dish. The ampalaya was not as bitter as I remember them to be and the okra was definitely the nickelodeon slimefest that I know them to be. Sigh. Old man winter let me down. The best reaction was the Roommate’s as he bit into a piece of ampalaya. He’s never had it before and was pretty much averse to the bitterness.

*As I was finishing up this post, I saw that MarketManila just put up a post on pinakbet and his version is definitely waaaaaay better looking than mine. Sigh. I really have to go to the Philippines and give these dishes a try close to the source.