one filipino dish a week

Friday night is a moment to celebrate every week. The Girl and I take a moment each Friday to celebrate and reflect on the triumphs and challenges of the week over a meal either at home or at a restaurant. It doesn’t have to be anything grand just a meal together to savor the moments of the past week and to just enjoy each other’s company. This week was dinner in and it was my turn to make dinner. Being the busy bees that we are there isn’t much time to make dinner even on a Friday. This meal that I whipped up doesn’t take much time at all.

Pork Chop
2-4 center cut pork chops (about 0.5 to 1 inch thick)
1/4 cup kosher salt
1/4 cup white sugar
3 tbsp brown sugar
salt and pepper to taste
2 tsp olive oil

In a 1 gallon ziploc plastic bag fill it 3/4 with water and dissolve the kosher salt and white sugar. Add the pork chops and brine for 1 hour. Brining the pork chops make a tremendous difference and makes the pork chops juicy. Pork in the US has gotten leaner over the last 20 years and with less fat it makes tougher pork.

After brining, pat dry each of the pork chops with a paper towel. On one side of each of the pork chops, coat with brown sugar. With the sugar side down, place the chops in a cold pan. Drizzle a little olive oil over the chops. Heat up the pan and within a couple of minutes the pork chops should start to sizzle. Once browned (about 5-7 minutes) turn the chops over and put the heat on low and cover. Cook the chops until it reads 150 degrees in an instant read thermometer. Let it rest covered for about 5 minutes before serving.

Garlic Fried Rice
lots of garlic minced
1 scallion chopped 1 inch long
left over white rice
salt to taste

Garlic fried rice is the perfect way to jazz up leftover rice. The key is to have a generous amount of garlic. Simply saute the garlic until light brown add the rice. Salt to taste. Don’t forget to salt! I’ve had lots of garlic rice that just lacks seasoning. Garnish with scallions.

What’s a meal without a drink? To round out this Friday night affair we had a bottle of Albarino, which is a white wine from Spain. I’ve become big fan of Albarino all thanks to Gary Vaynerchuk. I just like how this wine pairs up with a lot of different food and not to mention Filipino food. Lastly, Albarino is pretty reasonably priced so I can’t complain about that.

All in all it was another successful Friday night dinner. And I hope you take some time this week to spend a few minutes with someone you love over a good meal.

Eat Filipino Food!

A trip to the farmer’s market always yields some amazing stuff. Case in point… milk! I’ve heard great things about Ronny Brook Farms milk but I’ve actually never had it. It comes in old school bottles. The cows roam free and eat grass! It’s funny how that’s pseudo-revolutionary. I have to say that this milk is leagues above any milk you can get at the grocery store. The taste is pure, creamy, and silky smooth. It has that wow effect when you drink it. So definitely seek out your small dairy farms close by you and get some grass feed, hormone free milk. Next stop I’ll have to seek out some raw milk. This however was a major upgrade to the milk that I’ve been buying and I will try to get Ronny Brook Farms milk whenever I can.

To spice up the normal Sunday breakfast, I bought some wild turkey eggs from the farmer’s market. Once I saw it there was no way I was going to leave there without buying some. The eggs are bigger than the chicken eggs (quite understandably) and the shells almost look like marble or some kind of stone.  I forgot to make note of the farm which these came from but I’ll update the next time I see them.

Continuing with the farmer’s market theme. The Girl and I passed the stall that had a sign that said ‘Seriously Good Bacon.’ Well, if the sign said so I had to try it. Who doesn’t love bacon? There are some baco-vegetarians out there (vegetarians who have exceptions for bacon). Now that’s serious bacon eating. This bacon is from Violet Hill Farms in upstate NY.

Of course being Filipino a meal isn’t complete without rice. So I made some garlic fried rice (sinangag). I know I should’ve probably made tapsilog (tapa (filipino beef jerky) +  sinangag (garlic fried rice) + itlog (egg)). Wow that looked like a math equation of a full stomach! har har har! As for now…the verdict: This was one amazing Sunday breakfast! The eggs were great although I didn’t taste much of a difference from chicken eggs. The bacon was simply yummy. I would get that bacon again and again. Tasted nothing like store bought bacon at least 10x better.

To finish one big asian pear chilled and sliced. What a wonderful start to a Sunday.

Eat Filipino Food!

This past weekend was my Uncle’s birthday. And in true Filipino fashion there was lechon. Although this lechon is nowhere near close to the amazing lechon’s of Cebu. I remember growing up that we would get some lechon almost every Sunday in a market in Talisay. The funny part about it was that every single lady that was selling knew my mom and would call her to buy from them as we walk through the market. They would beckon her “Dai [my mom’s name], ari dai [my mom’s name] init pa kaayo ri dai! Bagong haon!” (roughly translated to: “Miss, miss over here this one’s still really hot! Just came out of the pit!” I never really knew how my mom was known by all those ladies selling lechon. It’s one of those mysteries of my childhood.

Inevitably, there’s going to be some leftover lechon. I feel like no matter how may people are at a party there’s always some leftover lechon at the end of the day. And Filipino parties do last the entire day! The leftover lechon can be made into paksiw!! I think I like paksiw better than lechon. Now that I think about it, I like lechon better when it’s cooked the second time paksiw or put in the oven to make it crispy.

To make this paksiw I used: equal parts of water, soy sauce and vinegar, whole peppercorns, and a couple bay leaves. I just realized as I’m writing this now that I probably should’ve put some garlic. Bring to a boil and let it simmer for a few minutes (~10-15mins). So that the fat from the pork gets mixed in with the juices.

Serve with some rice and pour the sauce on the rice. This was excellent (even though I forgot the garlic).

This is one modern party animal… har har har!

Ever since I made the striped bass a couple of weeks ago I’ve really been wanting to grill. I want that summer outdoor feel. I know it’s in the middle of winter here but I can fantasize about a nice beach afternoon. So I called up the parents to tell them to get the grill ready because I was on my way home for the weekend. So here was my chance to make the grilled fish that I wanted to make on a real grill and make some of pork bbq.

Filipino pork barbecue is delicious meat on a stick. There’s just something about meat on a stick that makes it so good. Pork bbq is well known as great street food in the Philippines and is pretty ubiquitous in the cities. The secret to pork bbq is the marinade. The marinade can make it or break it. The pork bbq that you can get from the street vendors has a sweet sauce marinade. I don’t know what it really is but it’s pretty damn good. Another characteristic of the street vendor pork bbq is the slices of meat are very very thin and you get a lot of fat (most likely to keep food cost down). This is great when eaten with atsara and puso (rice wrapped in coconut leaves aka hanging rice).

For this event (yes, it is a momentous event), I used this for a marinade: soy sauce, brown suga, rice wine, minced garlic, and finely chopped onion. In the past I’ve used ketchup or sprite to sweeten up but I feel like it makes it too sweet. Marinating for a long time is another key factor to great pork bbq (at least 6 hours). So I mixed the marinade and pork and put it in a nice big ziploc bag and refrigerated overnight. I used pork butt for the bbq because is looked like it had a nice meat to fat ratio. I’m not really sure what would be the best cut of the pork to do pork bbq with.

The next day I went over to my parent’s house and fired up the grill (charcoal for best smoke flavor). Too bad they didn’t have the wood charcoal so I settled with the briquettes. Once it’s all the meat is skewered up and the grill is hot it’s time to char some meat :). It shouldn’t take long for the skewers to cook. Only about 3-4 minutes on each side. It was fairly cold (mid 20s F) and slightly windy when I was grilling and it definitely affected how the food cooked. I didn’t anticipate that.

In the end the bbq came out great! We ate it with the atsara that I made then some rice and it was almost as if it was a nice day at the beach (minus the puso). Up next the seafood.

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.