Cooking, Sarap?

PANCIT CANTON Alright kids, let me tell you a story. There was once, long time ago, when crabs could fly and probably R wasn't allergic to shellfish, in an ancient and mysterious asian island lost between 1000 others,a young girl named Xit Pan. She was super pretty and her smile always cheered everyone, and also liked rice pasta a lot, therefore each morning she was going out in her rice field and she sang to the young plants with her angelic voice. Yes, Pan Xit can tune alright! One day, after her morning ritual, she went for a pina colada and a long walk on the beach when she spotted a young fisherman in his boat near the shore. The boat was half full of provisions as he looked like he was lost at sea.  Xit Pan introduced herself: "Pan Xit!" and pointed towards the boat. The fisherman didn't understand her language though and thought she was referring to his provisions. "Canned tuna!" he said. Anyway, long story short, she took him home and they got ma...

CHEESE SOUFFLE Hello hello everyone, or as the french say HohohoHooo, fromage! Yes, I have visited Paris last week and after being charmed by the culture, art and long lines in front of Nike shoes store, I have decided to take the cooking more seriously and try a french delicacy , of course using a filipino recipe. As such, today we shall prepare Souffle au Fromage , HohoHoHOO! Of course, this decision has a background story as we ( R included) crossed the city in search of genuine souffle for hours, and when we finally reached the Souffle Restaurant they would only take reservations. That being said I left the privilege of tasting the heaven to R, while I returned to Canada and decided to improve on the original recipe ( which is probably old and outdated ). Good! So here we are with joy and confidence! If you believe in yourself, you can move mountains(of souffle ). -We shall start as usual by having a screwdriver handy.  Then we separate the whites from the yellows (...

MAMI CHICKEN TINOLA Edit: I was told that tinola is by definition made with ginger. For those faint of heart, warning: I forgot to buy any. So this is Mami Chicken full stop.Anyway, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In my case, tinola is in your eyes. What gimger means to others, means nothing to me.Enjoy! Halo everyone, and Happy Winter as we say in Canada when August ends. Well, tomorrow is a special day, the Labour Day, which we don't celebrate 1st of May as the rest of the world because as you know Canada is on a different time zone so here it arrives a bit late. Probably on a boat. But since it conveniently interfered with my plans to go to work and do overtime ( because the paradox makes that you don't work on Labour day), I've decided to get back to an older cooking challenge, which is the first recipe that gloriously failed, the Chicken Tinola . But now, with experience under the hood and some new power torque in shape of wooden cooking spoons, courtesy of R...

KARE KARE Make some Kare Kare , make some Kare Kare ! they ask. Sure, just let me grab my yoga mat and... No, you silly ridiculous good looking man,I'm talking about the ox tail and peanut butter dish! What's that now? Fox tale? No, ox! And peanut butter! Oh, I see.. like probably when some random dude woke up in the morning after a rough night out, planning his english breakfast, but realized he ran out of french baguette, and then the Ox came by the table being like, Hey, what's up ma-maan? what's cooking? And the dude is looking long and measuring his tail with his eyes.. Nothing..nothing.. I just wonder.. how would that thing taste with some peanut butter spread on it you know. And some cabbage and stuff. And that's roughly what we'll try to prepare today, even if i'm sure it's quite difficult to get an ox to agree to the process. It also works well enough with pork knuckles instead, I guess since the dude and the ox were awkward to each oth...

HOT FRIED SILOG Good morning everyone and welcome back to the unsuccessful filipino cooking blog. As you may have not noticed, I took a break last weekend because of R's visit and because her sinigang and adobo are too good to be real. As such there was no need for my infamous food, but since now I'm alone again and I need to conserve the precious ( my preciooooouuuus ) leftovers for as long as possible, I shall get back to the pot, where I belong, and try inaugurating a new chapter in the history of my kitchen: cooking healthier. Yes, you heard right, I am willing to try to eat better following R's advice, because we all know that you are what you eat and I'm eating a lot of potatoes lately. Also the point was very well argued, ending with the traditional encouragement "or I'll punch your face". So let's begin first by cleaning the fridge of all remaining vegetables and deploying them into a new traditional recipe that I slightly improved and calle...

ARROZ SILOG Earth. Home of 1000 different types of banana s, 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 th...

MENUDO - AFTRITADA Good morning everyone and Oh Canada! to you also. Yes it's that week with 2 long weekends again ( don't worry, I did my shopping yesterday from an actual grocery store) because it's summer and that's when all Canadians do and celebrate stuff. Not that winter is not good enough but we just try to take advantage of the one month per year when your beer doesn't freeze your manly mustache. Aaaaaaanyway, since it's Canada day ( Ooooh Canadaaaa! ) we are going to prepare a traditional Filipino dish ( we'll add some Canadian touch to it also ). In fact let me rephrase that: we are going to prepare 2 in 1 dishes. Because we can ( and also to make L wait for the kare kare longer!) So the menu of the day is the all famous Chicken Afritada which we'll combine with another V.I.D ( very important dish),  Menudo  ( what can go wrong?) ! The two are in fact twin dishes which I, as a very good parent, can't really tell apart. So I'll call...