A casual dinner
When we entertain at home, I don’t stray away from the most important rule: I am entitled to enjoy the party as much as the guests and the rest of my family. Ergo, I make sure that the food does not require slave labor that will leave me catatonic by the time the first guests enter the front door.
My choices for last Saturday’s dinner: chicken and cabbage spring rolls; baked spaghetti with creamy cheese topping; bangus steaks a la pobre; chicken and mangoes in yogurt; and, for dessert, buko pandan.
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What to do with holiday leftovers: make a pie, a soup and Oriental fried rice
The champagne bottles are empty, the gifts have been opened and it’s back to work for most of us. But when we get home at the end of each day, it’s as though the holidays have not ended because the fridge is still full—of leftovers. There’s the ham, the carcass of the roast turkey or chicken, a bowl of sliced poultry meat…
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Oven-proof plastic bakeware by Glad
My own children are not immune from the charms of my baked mac and my younger daughter, Alex, requested that I prepare a tray of baked mac for her class’ Christmas party today. I did. But since I preferred not to send the baked mac in any of my Anchor Hocking glass baking dishes, my intention was to use one of those disposable aluminum trays. I found something better last night in the supermarket — oven-proof plastic bakeware by Glad which comes with transparent covers.
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The noche buena blog is live!
Please read the update in the Cooking for Christmas and the New Year entry.
The noche buena blog is LIVE. Well, kinda. I started posting entries today and since everything is a “future post”, the entries will auto post every two hours for the next 24 hours. There is a big BUT though. The four dishes that I cooked for Jessica Soho’s show will be posted on December 16, a day after the show is aired on Saturday, the 15th. I really don’t know why I agreed to that but then that kinda puts a suspense on everything and that has to be a good thing. At any rate, those are only four recipes. Everything else will be viewable in 24 hours.
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Update on the noche buena blog
Just a quick note on the progress of the noche buena blog which is scheduled to go live on December 12th. It’s already viewable but there’s only a static page that you can see for now. All the recipe entries are “future posts”, the timestamps edited to reflect the intended schedule. But just so you know that I haven’t been sleeping on the job, so to speak, let me show you the thumbnails of the photos of some of the recipes in the noche buena blog.
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Cooking for Christmas and the New Year
UPDATE on December 16, 2007 @ 2.35 p.m.
At around 3.00 p.m. yesterday, I received a text message from the Production Assistant of Jessica Soho’s show to inform me that some editing problems occurred and they weren’t sure if the episode could be aired last night. By 7.30 p.m., the “not sure” situation had not changed. I was assured, however, that the episode would be aired at a later date.
I have a lot to say about the unprofessionalism of those people but I’ll reserve that elsewhere. Suffice to say that I was caught in that position where I could not make any definite announcement even as late as 8.00 p.m. last night.
At any rate, the recipes for the dishes I cooked for that episode will be posted within the next 48 hours. In fact, the tropical fresh fruits salad recipe is already live in the Noche Buena Blog. I am not screwing up my posting schedule for them anymore.
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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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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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