Sweet and sour fish: don’t forget the ginger
Deep in the archive of Pinoy Cook is a recipe for sweet and sour fish. I used whole tilapia and took photos with my first digital camera — a point-and-shoot 1.3 megapixel Olympus. That entry was posted in April 2003, one of the first entries in my food blog. I look at that entry now and realized that cooks do get better with practice. The same thing is true with photography buffs. While the recipe itself has stayed pretty much the same, I have picked up a few techniques here and there that makes this version of sweet and sour fish just a little bit better.
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Kani salad
For dinner last night, I fried a 1.32-kilogram pompano, made a pot of miso soup while my husband prepared a bowl of Japanese kani salad.
What is kani salad? It is a mixture of cucumber, carrot, crab sticks and sweet ripe mango. Most recipes say just toss them with Japanese mayo but there was something missing. You really want to add a drizzle of sesame seed oil to give kani salad that unique Oriental flavor.
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Chicken and mushrooms burger
If you’ve been to Tagaytay City, you must have passed by Mushroom Burger along Aguinaldo Highway. And if you’re a Tagaytay habitue like I am, you must have eaten at the place more than once. If you’re a real Mushroom Burger fan, you would probably know that there used to be a branch at the Makati Commercial Center and that there is still a branch in Quezon City. And if you’re the kind of person who is curious about what exactly goes into a Mushroom Burger, you’d probably have read up or asked around and discovered that it is one part ground beef and one part ground oyster mushrooms.
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Don’t be a kitchen slave
Much as I love to cook and spend time experimenting with new dishes, when summer comes, I enter a stage of non-inspiration which is often combined with lethargy. It is simply too hot and with the stove on, the kitchen is the stuffiest and hottest part of the house. It doesn’t matter whether you install an industrial fan and open all the windows. Summer in the Philippines can be agony. Still, it isn’t an excuse for taking the easy way out by calling the pizza delivery service. The trick is to spend less time in the kitchen without subjecting my family to reheated leftovers.
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Lunch on the beach
Unlike Boracay, the beach in Roxas City is more intimate. It looks more like a neighborhood affair rather than a posh resort community. On one side are the private residences and on the opposite side are the restaurants and watering holes. Behind them, a few meters farther from the sea, are the fields where salted fish dry under the sun.
On our third day in Roxas City, after the bangus harvest, we had lunch at one of the restaurants that dot the beach — Coco Veranda.
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Chicken tinola and liver sauce
Tinolang manok or chicken soup with green papaya and chili leaves was a huge favorite with my family when my brother and I were growing up. My father taught me how to make a special dipping sauce to make the tinola experience even more satisfying — a mixture of mashed chicken liver with patis (fish sauce). I taught my own kids to eat tinola with chayote rather than green papaya, and I never had the opportunity to introduce them to green papaya and the mashed liver and patis dipping sauce until a few nights ago.
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Soba with fish balls and quekiam
For all you noodle lovers out there, here’s something we enjoyed recently per the request of my daughter Sam who said she missed terribly stir fried oriental noodles with store-bought fishballs and quekiam. This is commercial quekiam, mind you, the kind you buy frozen from the supermarket, not the kind wrapped in tawpe (bean curd skin) that is served as an appetizer in Chinese restaurants. Commercial quekiam is so called only because it is shaped and colored like the real quekiam. In truth, it’s mostly flour. So are the fish balls, actually.
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Chicken soup a la picadillo
Don’t confuse Filipino-style picadillo with the Mexican and Cuban picadillo which is a ground beef stew. The Philippine version of the Cuban picadillo is arroz a la Cubana.
Picadillo in the Philippines is a soup with small pieces of beef. My father made his with potato cubes; my mother-in-law’s version has chayote. My version has carrot, potato and chayote cubes. How that happened is related in one of the earliest entries in this blog where you will also find an explanation as to why I call the dish Speedy’s picadillo.
This entry is about substituting cubes of chicken thigh fillets for the beef…
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