Lechon con kangkong (roast pork with water spinach)
It was a rather large slab of pork belly that I roasted in the oven a few days ago and I had two bunches of kangkong so a second dish seemed like a great idea. I wasn’t planning on posting this recipe because I always thought I had a lechon con kangkong entry deep in the archive. Seems not. What I have in the archive is pork and kangkong in black bean sauce which does not make use of lechon kawali. Lucky me, I managed to cook two dishes that day that are both worth posting.
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Video: gutting and cleaning fresh fish
The short video on how to gut and clean fresh fish was taken by my daughter Sam using her Sony Ericsson K800i. It’s my way of announcing that very shortly I will be posting food and cooking videos in Pinoy Cook — not taken with a cell phone but with a real video cam. Yeah, straight from my kitchen. And street food too. It’s an idea that I’ve been toying around with for sometime…
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Chicken a la king
Chicken a la king is not a common item in Filipino parties but it is a special occasion dish for my family. It is my husband’s favorite dish in the whole wide world and his mother only cooks chicken a la king for his birthday. Okay, so I decided he can feel like it’s his birthday today. I cooked a rather large pot of chicken a la king and made sure that it had lots of sauce so that the kids could enjoy it too.
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Lechon kawali with a new twist
When I posted a recipe for a dish that I called lechon kawali stew over three years ago, someone told me that its traditional name was lechon macau. Whether the name connotes the geographic origin of a similar dish, I really do not know. The dish I cooked was just something to make use of leftover lechon kawali. I was planning on cooking the same dish earlier today when the bottle of Kecap Manis in the fridge caught my eye. What do you know? It went perfectly with the lechon kawali.
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Pork and beans
The ‘pork and beans’ I grew up with came straight from the can. We only bought one brand — Hunt’s. My brother and I used to say how apt the name ‘pork and beans’ was — one piece of fatty pork and lots of beans. Much later, I would learn to remedy that by adding cubes of pork belly to the contents of the can… These days, I like cooking my own pork and beans using dried beans.
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The heart and soul of Filipino food
My editor asked, ?What characterizes great Filipino food? The long hours of simmering? The recipes that have been handed down through generations? The bold flavor of Ilocos garlic and sibuyas Tagalog? Or is it simply the time a family spends in sitting down for a meal and then continues to share stories long after the food is gone??
I was transported to a night when my father labored over home-made siopao per my request when it would have been the easiest thing to drive to Binondo to buy a dozen…
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Food for the Gods and the accidental Christmas cake
As early as 2004, I have been talking about baking an all-Filipino fruit cake…I wasn’t able to bake one that year. Nor the next. Nor the year after that. Glazed fruits always go out of stock before Christmas and the dream stayed as a dream. Until yesterday. I overbaked my all-Filipino version of Food for the Gods (caught up in my reading) and I was wondering how to salvage it. The solution consisted of a bamboo skewer, a pastry brush, cinnamon-flavored pancake syrup, Bacardi rum, a lot of guts and even more patience.
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Rolled porkloin with bacon, basil and rosemary
I was supposed to go to a taping for a TV show today for an episode on Christmas noche buena cooking. The way the invitation was worded, I understood that the show follows a discussion format. But after I had said yes I was told that I’d be cooking a noche buena dish and I’d have to bring the ingredients and the cooking utensils as well. Huh? Maybe, I should transport my entire kitchen too? So, I said, “Sorry, can’t.” That’s really much too inconvenient. I’d rather show you a noche buena idea right here.
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