ARROZ A LA CUBANA

ARROZ SILOG

Earth. Home of 1000 different types of bananas, undercover aliens (see U.S. president), and best most diverse variety of silog breakfast from Philippines. What is silog ? are the two other imaginary non filipino readers of my blog asking. Well, it's basically what we are going to cook today ( just so that we avoid Kare Kare once again and test L's patience), because Arroz a la Cubana is mostly a fancy named silog variety. So we're going to cook Arroz Silog, which I'll basically translate as Riced Rice with egg. You can find out all about silog here in case you are curious, which we all know you aren't. 

Also, I'll get right to it because your time is precious and I just fill it with non relevant information. 

Right, so grab that pan and get banging. Not literally.

1- we make a nice rice from start this time (unlike last weekend) and set it aside gently.

2- chop onion and garlic ( my favorite activity) , chew gum, and cry about the faith of the world, global warming and the Paris agreement. This is a stringent subject since Canada was hit by a heat wave last week ( yes, I know right, heat!? ) and Canadian Tire just ran out of fans and coolers. I'm sure they will get more in stock soon though and then we can happily contribute to the CO2 level increase by using it at max power. Right, so we chop the thing and add a medium tomato also, for no other reason than colors. My personal input here, also some green onion which I bought for making salad but then I forgot to buy salad. Anyway,onion colors are complementing themselves nicely. Burn them a bit in a mix of olive oil and sunflower.

3- once the medium tomato becomes more like a small tomato, add in the ground beef and pork meat. It might look simple to the untrained eye but guess what, there was no minced pork at the shop today. But this wasn't going to stop us right? That is why we got some of those big pork german sausages. As R's adventurous palate strongly affirms, german sausage is the best, aside from czech sausage of course. That being said, I would have chosen italian, except that I have a personal issue with italians and their sausages. See, we are already preparing longsilog here, and by long I'm not praising the qualities of the german sausage but merely translating it into the silog variety described in the beginning. Also size is irrelevant. Aaaanyhow, we get the sausage minced pork meat and put it in the soup/ I mean put in pot ( I recommend listening to the soup song while cooking, it basically summarize our cooking principles). Cover the abomination and let it alone in the dark at medium heat for 10 minutes.

4- now it's time to prepare our unique signature sauce. Yes, the recipe asks for soy sauce and 3 spoons of Worcester sauce, but reading the label is merely a vinegar, sugar and 20% of your daily salt intake mix so then I thought, well that looks easy! We shall prepare it from scratch of course, no point in investing in English named products, we are in Quebec! En francais! Ok, so get the soy, 3 spoons of on sale tomato sauce and mix it in a large cauldron while wearing a black pointy hat. Add in some wine vinegar and top it with some wine vinegar to cut the acidity. Replace the spoon which got dissolved in the mix  already and add the secret ingredient: honey!( if you want to know more about honey and the importance of the bees, I must insist again, check out this blog entry. Or listen to the soup song. Again! Addictive! )

5- alright, we add the black bubbly mix in the cauldron and see how it gets along with the abomination from point 3. Since they seem to be understanding each other, let them conspire in the darkness for another 6 minutes or so.

6- we add in the frozen peas which we got left from last week cooking so there's carrots and corn also. Who cares, it's already delicious. Also add in some pepper that we previously crushed into submission.

7- Now, for the nice topping we get the second biggest plantain banana we have ever seen and fry it nicely. We save the biggest one for tomorrow or other dark purposes which shall not be discussed here. Add an egg in the pan because it's cool!

8-That's it. Serve in a more aesthetically pleasing way than my picture and enjoy this delicious SisigHotLongsilog Riced Rice Arroz a la Cubana!  Sarap!

P.S.: the official recipe calls for raisins but NO! Abomination ++. You can add some if you like though. Or peanuts. We love peanuts. And peanut butter.