'Soup recipes' archive

Fish and malunggay soup

A day after I cooked this soup for lunch, I finally did what I had been promising myself for a long time — plant a malunggay tree in my own garden. So, let’s just say that this fish and malunggay soup is a celebration.

It’s nothing fancy, really. I cooked a fish soup in much the same way that I cook tahong (mussels) and malunggay…

A soup called bachoy

“Bachoy” is the collective term for pork lomo (tenderloin), lapay (spleen) and bato (kidney). It is also the name of a traditional soup cooked with lots of ginger. If noodles are added and the noodle dish is topped with ground chicharon (pork crackling), it is called la paz bachoy. I’ll have to skip la paz bachoy with the pork crackling — too much fat for my diet. But the basic bachoy dish can be made almost fat-free if you trim all the visible fat from the pork.

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.

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…

Molo soup for a hot summer night

… just as we decided to stick to a fish, chicken and vegetables diet, there was a sale at the fresh meat section of the supermarket two days ago — ground pork mix for making lumpiang shanghai. Buy one kilo, get another kilo for free. I couldn’t resist. So much savings. Besides, it’s not like we’re reverting to the meaty diet we have been used to in the past. And although the package said shanghai mix, I didn’t use the ground pork mix for lumpiang shanghai. On Tuesday, dinner was fried hito (catfish) and molo soup or pancit molo…

Pinatisang bangus (milkfish soup with fish sauce)

My fifteen-minute fish soup made with boneless bangus belly fillets, shallots, tomatoes, garlic and onion leaves. It went into the kids’ school lunch boxes.

There is much confusion about the nature of shallots as the name is often interchanged with scallions. In Southeast Asian cooking, shallots refer to small red onions; scallions are the onion leaves. In Filipino cooking, shallots are sibuyas Tagalog (Allium ascalonicum) which would make them “authentic” shallots as being one of the two species of the Allium plant that are considered true shallots.

Sinigang na ulo ng isda sa miso (fish head sour soup with miso)

Miso is a paste made by fermenting rice, barley or soybeans with salt and a mold. In Philippine cuisine, it is used for the dipping sauce that accompanies pesa. It is also used for sinigang.

Kanduli, a relative of the hito (catfish) is traditionally associated with sinigang sa miso. But large kanduli is not always easy to find in the wet markets…

Sinigang na baboy (sour soup with pork): it’s all in the bones

If you’re intend to serve the sinigang as a soup (meaning you have another dish for the main course), then, the important thing is to have the best quality broth you can make. That means bones — lots of bones. If, however, you intend to serve the sinigang as the main dish, you need meatier cuts of pork. Otherwise, you’ll be practically serving rice with broth and vegetables and very little meat.

About Pinoy Cook

• About the author
• Cooking philosophy
• Food photography
• Where I cook
• Where I used to cook
• The noche buena section
• Product review policy
• Terms of use
• Privacy policy
• Recipe archive
• Published articles
• Food from all over
• E-mail the author

House On A Hill

Asian cooking

• Tofu and Vegetables Stir-fry
• White (Hainanese) chicken
• 20-minute pancit miki
• Beef and tausi stir-fry
• Japchae (jabchae, chapchae or chapchee), a Korean noodle dish
• Rice noodles and dumplings
• Thrice cooked pata tim
• Pork siomai (steamed dumplings), pearl balls and lumpiang shanghai (fried spring rolls)
• Baby prawns and broccoli fried rice with oyster sauce
• Chicken, tofu and kangkong (water / swamp spinach) with chili garlic sauce

How to cook

• Stuffing a duck with aromatics
• Soup tricks
• Don’t be a kitchen slave
• Stewed mung beans
• The how-to-cook series
• If you want your chilis mildly hot instead of very hot
• The perfect barbecue sauce/marinade
• Meals in a flash, part 2
• Pork siomai (steamed dumplings), pearl balls and lumpiang shanghai (fried spring rolls)
• Tips for cooking Chinese-style fried rice