Save the meat from the soup bones
I’m not sure if this is true everywhere and for everybody but whenever I buy soup bones, I actually get more than bones. There’s a lot of meat in them that if you’re diligent enough to pick the meat after simmering the bones, you’ll get enough to make a pretty good meat and vegetable soup. And every time I salvage the meat from soup bones, I wonder if I don’t have something of my late grandmother in me.
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Cold soba noodles
Originating from Japan, soba noodles are made with buckwheat flour. According to Wikipedia, because buckwheat easily falls apart when boiled, soba noodles often contain binders, usually wheat flour, but must contain at least 30% buckwheat flour to pass Japanese government standards.
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Blueberry streusel cupcakes
When I asked my husband to buy frozen blueberries, I was half expecting that he’d come home with a pack of “Baguio-grown” blueberries. Wishful thinking, I guess, because there were only packs of imported blueberries in the supermarket. We grow blueberries at Trinidad Valley in Benguet but we never seem to be able to find them in local markets.
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My daughter’s 14th birthday
My daughter, Alex, had a few classmates over yesterday. They were supposed to do an ecology project but since yesterday was also her 14th birthday, a few other friends, non-members of the ecology group, joined us and we had pasta, chicken, toast and cake for merienda. The menu might look like fastfood fare, the stuff kids love, but the chicken was NOT fried, the toast was buttered whole wheat bread, the pasta sauce was all-natural and the cake was made with frozen — not canned — blueberries…
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Strawberry streusel cake
According to Wikipedia, the term streusel (a German word meaning “something scattered or sprinkled”, from the verb streuen, akin to the English verb ’strew’) refers to a crumb topping of butter, flour, and sugar (traditional German) that is baked on top of muffins, breads, and cakes. The original recipe used fresh blueberries; I substituted strawberries.
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Baked eggplants with bacon and cheese
Vegetables don’t excite me, as a rule. This dish is an exception. Based on the classic Italian eggplant parmigiana, this baked dish consists of layers of eggplant slices, a home-cooked tomato sauce with bacon and cheese. Omit the bacon from the recipe, or substitute mushrooms, and you have a wonderful vegan dish.
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Green curry paste: how hot do you want your food?
The popularity of chicken curry in the Philippines is such that you will find it listed as a Filipino dish in many cookbooks written by local authors. And 99% of these recipes call for a tablespoonful or so of curry powder. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it in more than one entry — curry is not a spice per se; it is a mixture of as many as 20 spices…
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Sour cream and garlic dipping sauce
The trick to a tasty sour cream and garlic dip is to grate the garlic instead of chopping it. Grate it, and grate an onion too, and add all the juices too. That way, the dip is smooth, no bits of garlic nor onion on your tongue and the juices mixed in will give the dip a deep and wonderful flavor that you’ll never get from commercial dips that come ready made in tubs…
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